When it comes to the artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China lags behind the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is leading the way.
New research shows that China has by some measures eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of artificial intelligence talent, with the country producing nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers. By contrast, about 18 percent come from U.S. undergraduate institutions, according to the study, by MacroPolo, a think tank run by the Paulson Institute that promotes constructive ties between the United States and China.
The findings mark a jump for China, which produced about a third of the world’s top talent three years earlier. The United States, by contrast, remained largely the same. The research builds on the background of researchers whose papers were published at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS, as it is known, focuses on advances in neural networks, which have underpinned recent advances in genetic artificial intelligence
The talent imbalance has been building for the better part of a decade. During most of the 2010s, the United States benefited as large numbers of China’s top minds moved to American universities to complete doctorates. The majority of them remained in the United States. But research shows that this trend is also beginning to change, with an increasing number of Chinese researchers staying in China.
What happens in the coming years could be critical as China and the United States take the lead in artificial intelligence — a technology that can potentially increase productivity, boost industries and drive innovation — by turning researchers in one of the most important geopolitical groups in the world.
Generative AI has taken the tech industry in Silicon Valley and China by storm, sparking a funding and investment frenzy. The boom has been driven by US tech giants like Google and startups like OpenAI. That could attract China’s researchers, although rising tensions between Beijing and Washington could also deter some, experts said.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
China has nurtured so much AI talent in part because it has invested heavily in AI training. Since 2018, the country has added more than 2,000 undergraduate AI programs, with more than 300 at its most elite universities, said Damien Ma, chief executive of MacroPolo, although he noted that the programs did not focus heavily on the technology that had led to innovations. by chatbots like ChatGPT.
“Many of the programs are about AI applications in industry and manufacturing, not so much with the productive AI hardware that currently dominates the American AI industry,” he said.
While the United States has led innovations in artificial intelligence, most recently with the unusually human-like abilities of chatbots, a significant portion of this work has been done by researchers trained in China.
Researchers of Chinese descent now make up 38 percent of top AI researchers working in the United States, with Americans making up 37 percent, the survey found. Three years earlier, those from China made up 27 percent of top talent working in the United States, compared with 31 percent from the United States.
“The data shows how critical Chinese-born researchers are to the United States’ AI competitiveness,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies Chinese artificial intelligence.
He added that the data seems to show that the United States is still attractive. “We are the world leader in artificial intelligence because we continue to attract and retain talent from around the world, but especially China,” he said.
Pieter Abbeel, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of Covariant, an artificial intelligence and robotics start-up, said that working with a large number of Chinese researchers is taken for granted at top American companies and universities.
“It’s just a natural state of affairs,” he said.
In the past, US defense officials weren’t too concerned about AI talent flows from China, in part because many of the biggest AI projects didn’t involve classified data and in part because they thought it was better to have the best minds available. . The fact that so much of the leading AI research is published openly also tempers concerns.
Despite the bans introduced by the Trump administration barring entry to the United States for students from certain military universities in China and the relative slowdown in the flow of Chinese students into the country during Covid, the survey showed a large number of the most promising A.I. minds continued to come to the United States to study.
But this month, a Chinese national who was an engineer at Google was accused of trying to transfer AI technology — including critical microchip architecture — to a Beijing-based company that secretly paid him, according to a federal indictment.
The significant number of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers working in the United States is now a conundrum for policymakers, who want to tackle Chinese espionage without discouraging the continued flow of top Chinese computer engineers to the United States, according to experts focused on American competitiveness.
“Chinese scholars are almost pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, an artificial intelligence professor and researcher at Arizona State University. If policymakers try to block Chinese nationals from researching in the United States, he said, “they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”
The track record of US policymakers is mixed. A Trump administration policy aimed at curbing Chinese industrial espionage and intellectual property theft has since been criticized for wrongfully prosecuting some professors. Such programs, Chinese migrants said, have encouraged some to stay in China.
For now, the survey showed, most Chinese who complete doctorates in the United States stay in the country, helping to make it the global center of the artificial intelligence world. Even so, the U.S. lead has begun to slip, hosting about 42 percent of the world’s top talent, down from about 59 percent three years ago, the survey found.
