GenAI lessons from China

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and startups often hog the limelight when it comes to technology discussions in India.

- PROSAIC VIEW

This is why much of today's commentary is concentrated on the battle for Generative AI (GenAI) supremacy-and by extension, the race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - in the US, to the exclusion of what is happening in other countries. While the French startup Mistral has received some attention because of Microsoft's investment of late, the developments in China are either ignored or receive only limited attention.

This is a mistake. There is plenty of evidence that the US government's bid to deny advanced chips and other resources to Chinese companies has not been particularly successful in slowing China's progress in AI and GenAI. Enough high-end Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) are making their way to China, either via smugglers or intermediaries in other countries who use paperwork to obscure the trail to the final buyers.

Then, recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that brokers are offering cloud services and computing power from high-end servers with Nvidia chips in overseas countries to Chinese tech companies. These allow Chinese AI firms to access the high-end computing infrastructure, with the US authorities being none the wiser.