Chinese AI labs must accelerate development, says Huawei exec fueling fears that a US AI slowdown would benefit China
A Huawei executive is urging Chinese AI companies to step on the gas and catch up with leading US AI labs — a sharp contrast to mounting calls in Silicon Valley for a slowdown of AI development over growing fears about the technology. Chinese researchers need to “increase the speed of development so they can also see the dangers of AI development” like their US counterparts, said Eric Xu, the rotating chair at Chinese tech giant Huawei at a Thursday press conference.Once those dangers emerge, the industry will have to “strike a balance between driving development and risks,” Xu added.His comments came just days after Anthropic and OpenAI called for a coordinated slowdown in AI development following a chorus of safety warnings about AI going rogue that have ignited a growing debate about the merits of a slowdown of AI development. Critics have argued an AI slowdown would offer Chinese tech companies the chance to leapfrog the US in building the most advanced systems. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, for instance, has said: “If we didn’t have the adversaries we’d have, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but we do.” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and executive chairman of Google, told Fox Business: “China is very smart, they know what they are doing.A six-month pause on research into artificial intelligence would simply benefit China.” Xu’s comments echo similar comments made by Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab. “AI progress is happening faster and it’s more frontier in the U.S., so people at U.S.
labs may see more dangerous things than people in Chinese labs,” Qian told the Wall Street Journal, adding that Chinese researchers don’t have the same culture of gauging societal impact as US researchers.Huawei, for its part, is racing to catch up with US chip titan Nvidia which builds AI hardware that outperforms Chinese systems. Xu acknowledged that Huawei remains “not as advanced�...