Take four rather opinionated people about AI--and damn near everything else--toss in geopolitics and you get an AI debate that mimicked gorillas pounding their chests.
Welcome to a US vs. China AI debate at Constellation Research's AI Forum in Silicon Valley. Here's a recap.
Dr. David Bray, Principal/CEO & Distinguished Chair of the Accelerator LeadDoAdapt Ventures & Stimson Center, said the real war is about networks more than countries. People that value freedom will form networks regardless of countries. "Nations only came about 200 years after the printing press. It's a fairly new phenomenon. We may actually look back and look today, well, those nations that was a passing fad and then you have your preferences. I have my preferences," said Bray.
Esteban Kolsky, Advisor to Kings and Queens, ThinkJar, LLC, agreed countries were a false construct. "The whole role of a country or a nation is to deal with intractable problems and provide infrastructure to solve those intractable problems. That's it. That's the only role they have. It has no role whatsoever in investing in AI or technology. It has no role whatsoever in designing policy for AI or technology," he said. "Innovation doesn't have borders."
Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, said the AI war is just a derivative of competition over energy. China can get energy costs down close to zero. The real war is over the supply chain and robots. Wang said:
"We're in a global race for cheap and abundant energy. China can get to energy at zero cents a kilowatt hour in production. That means they're going to manufacture things cheaper than us. They're going to get to AI cheaper than us. They're fighting for the global supply chain on robots. They've got the rare earths, they've got the data, they've got the manufacturing capacity, and they've got cheap energy. They're going to be able to deliver robots at $10 per robot, while we're trying to do it at $1,000."
Mark Minevich, President and founding partner of Going Global Ventures, a digital cognitive AI strategist, a UN advisor, an investor and an artificial intelligence expert, said the US is tactical and China is strategic. "We have amazing stuff, but we don't have as much data as China has. We don't know what they're doing with agents. They are moving, they're robotizing, moving of agents everywhere. So they're doing things that we would not do in the US," said Minevich, who argued that the US has an advantage of private and public sector partnership.
Ultimately, the battle may be over centralized planning and control and decentralized networks. The answer may be both.
Wang said:
"We started out this conversation between China versus US but between the two, we talked about AI strategy. That's a central strategy, a centralization strategy, not necessarily centralization, which is the governance model we're talking about. It's more about governance. We all got into a heated debate intentionally for theatrics here.
But the main point here is we're confused about this need for centralization, decentralization and coordination. There's a balance in it right now. The challenge is we're trying to figure out what this is going to mean to society of humanity and we're confused. Do we need centralization to save ourselves? Do we need decentralized to escape?"
Naturally, I ran the transcript of this debate through AI sentiment analysis.
- OpenAI's ChatGPT found the discussion "to be a mix of concern, urgency, and strategic focus, with some optimistic and constructive undertones."
- Otter said the discussion reflected "a mix of concern, competitiveness, and cautious optimism regarding the technological and economic rivalry between the two nations."
- Google's Gemini said the sentiment was "primarily one of concern and urgency. There's also a sense of anxiety about the future of democracy and the impact of AI on society."
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