China might be winning the AI race. Does it matter?

A Beijing company recently released China's smartest artificial intelligence model, closing the gap between that country and the United States in a race that some have likened to a new Cold War.

Kimi K2 Thinking, developed by Moonshot AI, is a generative AI chatbot similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.

“This is the closest thing the Chinese model has. come to a coincidence performance of an American or Western model since Deepsik This model caused a market crash due to concerns about the development of artificial intelligence in China.

In comparison, the release of Kimi K2 went unnoticed. But in the last exam of humanity, he received high marks. a notoriously difficult 2,500-question test which tests the AI's reasoning abilities, in addition to regurgitating information, placing right after the latest ChatGPT models and outperform Claude 4.5 and Meta's Llama.

“It's definitely [still] it is a case that the US is ahead of China in the field of artificial intelligence,” said Deng Wang, author Vertigo: China's quest to create the future. But according to the same criteria, this advantage is “narrowed in all respects.”

Whether China's advances against the U.S. will matter depends on who you ask, according to experts who spoke to CBC News.

That some North American companies and consumers choosing Chinese-made AI “just tells you the technical sophistication that we're seeing in China and how it really competes with the best of what we're seeing in the U.S. right now,” said Sheldon Fernandez, co-founder of Toronto-based DarwinAI, which developed AI for quality control in manufacturing and has since been acquired by Apple.

Open-source AI models like those being developed in China “are cheaper and you can run them in your own environment,” he said. They can be modified to suit the user's needs, although this may require some technical knowledge.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky complained that ChatGPT was “not reliable enough” said last month that the vacation rental company relies heavily on the Qwen model, owned by Chinese company Alibaba. AI agents.

And venture capital firm Social Capital recently shifted its workload to Kimi K2 because it was more efficient and was “frankly just a ton cheaper than OpenAI and Anthropic,” Chamath Palihapitiya, the company's Canadian-American CEO, said during the conference. All inclusive podcast.

Deng, the Bloomberg analyst, says he doesn't expect Chinese models to take over the market anytime soon.

In addition to the market, there are those who view the race to improve AI in the harsher light of potential real-world conflict.

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“The feeling is that the US and China are in a new state of Cold War,” Wang said, adding that some see artificial intelligence as a “decisive technology” on the scale of atomic weapons or the space race, which could have major economic and national security implications.

Likewise, Fernandez says some see the race to advance AI as a means of instilling a particular set of values ​​in the technology.

“It’s not just a question of opportunity,” he said. “The question is what kind of value do we want to see in these systems, both as consumers and for our children, for marginalized communities. And that's why this is so important.”

In this regard, US Senator Ted Cruz stated A recent article said China's dominance in artificial intelligence would mean “government surveillance and coercion,” while an American victory would guarantee technology based on “freedom, human dignity and the rule of law.”

However, this may be too optimistic, given cultural prejudices, unpleasant policy And selective memories demonstrated AI from both countries.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, also said it is “vital” that America wins the AI ​​race and that China is only “nanoseconds” behind the US in developing the technology. Of course, Nvidia—the main supplier of semiconductor chips to many of America's leading artificial intelligence companies—has an obvious horse in this race.

But there are those, Wang says, “who feel that it doesn't necessarily matter because no one really knows what AI is or what it can actually do in the future.”

Both countries have strengths and weaknesses. Compared to the US, China has become a force be calculated by electrical powerwhich is necessary to power the AI.

But it also depends on the US government. export controls on semiconductor chips (keeping Nvidia's most advanced products outside of China), threatening Beijing's ability to build data center infrastructure on the scale of its rival.

And, Wang argues, both countries are creating and using this technology in different ways.

Silicon Valley is trying to invent a “God in a box,” he said, “so he can figure out all of our science, all of our medicine, all of the solutions to climate change, and then, as the icing on the cake, all of our social and political problems as well.”

“The Chinese point of view is also that it will be a controlled, normal technology that will be useful in all kinds of industrial and technological processes.

“So I think there is no one race.”

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