In the second half of the 20th Century, it was the race to develop nuclear arms that occupied some of the finest minds in the US and the Soviet Union.
Now the US finds itself in a different kind of race with a different adversary: China. The aim is to dominate technology; specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It’s a fight taking place in research labs, on university campuses, and in the offices of cutting-edge start-ups – watched over by leaders of some of the world’s richest companies, and at the highest levels of government. It costs trillions of US dollars.
And each side has its strengths – something Nick Wright, who works on cognitive neuroscience at University College London (UCL), neatly sums up as the battle between “brains” and “bodies”.
The US has traditionally led on so-called AI brains: the world of chatbots, microchips, and large language models (LLMs). China has been superior on AI “bodies”: robots (and in particular, “humanoid” robots that look eerily like people).
But now, with both sides anxious not to let their rival dominate, those advantages might not remain forever – and the race may yet be transformed further in the coming years.
The battle for LLM dominance
On 30 November 2022, the California-based tech firm, OpenAI, launched its new chatbot. In a six-sentence statement, the company announced they had trained a new model “which interacts in a conversational way”.
It was called ChatGPT. Immediately, the tech world was dazzled.
“You could go on any sort of social network and there was just this flood of posts from people talking about all the different ways that they were using this new little text box that had appeared on the internet,” says Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson, author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the race that will change the world.
It was the birth of the first mainstream large language model, or LLM. An LLM analyses vast quantities of text and data that already exists on the internet, and uses it to learn patterns in how ideas are expressed.
And now, experts broadly agree that when it comes to so-called AI “brains”, the US has the upper hand.
OpenAI claims that more than 900 million people now use ChatGPT every week – almost one in eight people on the planet. Other American tech firms like Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity raced to keep up, spending billions of US dollars creating rival LLM systems.
Those AI companies know that if they get it right, LLMs can start to assume many of the functions in white-collar professions that humans do now – and that commercial victory translates into lots of easy cash…
Credit: BBC
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