U.S-China AI talent race heats up

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When it comes to brainpower, America’s advantage is seriously declining, Miller told the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee last week. “It’s the bullet.”Fragile and much smallerHe said: “One of its advantages is in artificial intelligence chips.

Carnegie Endowment researchers She echoed these concerns A day later, noting that China has produced more high-level AI researchers over the past few years, while fewer are heading to the United States.

Part of this difference comes from sheer size, especially with China’s high levels of education.

It has a population four times that of the United States, and the same is true for the volume of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates. In 2020, China produced 3.57 million graduates in STEM fields, the most of any country, and far exceeds the 820,000 in the United States.

The growth of China’s higher education graduates has been tremendous, increasing ninefold in just one generation. The proportion of adults with at least a master’s degree increased from Only 0.1% at the turn of the century to approximately 0.9% two decades later.

The United States, starting from a much higher base, saw the same percentage rise more steadily from 8.7% to 14.1% over that period.

The boom is reshaping companies’ pipelines. CEO He Xiaopeng told reporters last month that most of Xpeng’s new employees are recent graduates.

He claimed that despite having a relatively small pool of AI talent in both the US and China, the electric car manufacturer was able to hire 10 driver-assistance technology specialists this year.

The company’s former vice president of autonomous driving now heads Nvidia’s automotive division.

Beijing is working to engineer more of this momentum in its quest Technological self-sufficiency. The Ministry of Education said in August that five Higher education programmes All parts of the country have been revamped in the last couple of years – with a large number of specialties reduced or added – to it Directing more students to artificial intelligence And areas of integrated circuits.

China is not necessarily much better at this Attracting global talent in the field of artificial intelligenceBut the ability to keep more AI experts at home “could have a significant impact on talent flow,” Tufts University’s Lee Miller noted in an email.

Meanwhile, he said US immigration rules could make it difficult for AI researchers to work in the United States.

Despite the limitations, Chinese companies have increasingly found ways to use scale — whether in less-advanced engineers, chips or data — to gradually build up domestic AI capabilities. This is evident in how Chinese AI models are competing with OpenAI in Part of the cost.

Developers in China are also doing more with less.

Chinese internet leaders spent about 400 billion yuan ($56.58 billion) in capital expenditures this year — about a tenth of their U.S. peers, while achieving “similar” typical AI performance, Wei Xiong, a China internet analyst at UBS Securities, said in a report last week.

While analysts sometimes warn of “Circular finance“In the US AI industry – supported by investor money circulating within the same financing ecosystem rather than real commercial revenues – by contrast, leading developers in China rely primarily on internal cash flow.

The abundance of data is another advantage. The popularity of short videos in China has given local companies a treasure trove of training materials. Apart from two models from Google, the rest of the top 15 image-to-video AI generation models in the world came from it From Chinese companiesaccording to the artificial intelligence analysis company.

Chinese companies also published Fastest growth In granting US patents last year, with the telecom giant Huawei is in fifth place Generally between commercial companies.

The company’s global patent licensing revenue reached a record $630 million last year, with further growth expected in 2025, according to Huawei Vice President Alan Fan, who heads the company’s intellectual property rights division. He said customers are increasingly looking for not only 5G and Wi-Fi-related patents, but also audio and video technologies.

And back home, so is Huawei Partnership With universities for Research and training related to artificial intelligence.

All of these efforts add to a growing trend.

China has Ranked first in the US index Measuring student performance in STEM Olympiad competitions for several years. China’s contributions to scientific research, as tracked by the publisher of the scientific journal Nature, will surpass the United States in 2023 — and Four times that lead The following year.

However, talent still flows both ways. Lu Zhang, founder and managing partner of the local Fusion Fund, told me that many Chinese founders still move to Silicon Valley to launch their startups. She pointed to the benefits of working within “one of the best enterprise ecosystems.”

She said her biggest concern for the industry is insufficient electrical power, especially in the United States. “I think before we run out of GPU, we will run out of power,” she said.

Energy is an area where analysts increasingly say China has the upper hand.

In the triad of factors Miller identified in his Senate testimony for maintaining AI leadership — computing power, brain power, and electrical power — human capital is not his only concern. “America has great advances in computing power, [but] “China is a leader in the field of electric energy.”

Chinese markets fell on Wednesday as investors analyzed the latest inflation data. Hong Kong Hang Seng Index The CSI 300 fell 0.56% and the CSI 300 fell 0.78% after consumer prices in China rose 0.7% from a year earlier, the highest level since February last year.

Both standards are set to break a two-week winning streak. The Hang Seng Index is down more than 2% since Monday, while the CSI 300 is down 0.5% over the same period. Year to date, the Hang Seng is up more than 26%, while the CSI 300 is up more than 15%.

The yuan was last trading offshore at 7.0605 against the dollar, its strongest level since October 2024.

-Li Ying Shan