The gap between China and the United States in the race for artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly narrow, with both nations possessing distinct strengths and maintaining leading positions globally, said Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics.
China's economic structural transformation has shifted the country from a supplier to a competitor in meeting international market demands, particularly for developed nations that previously led in high-tech and advanced manufacturing sectors.
In an interview with China Media Group (CMG), Spence, also a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said that China is ahead of the rest of the world in some areas, and catching up quickly in others, including AI.
"One, the gap between China and the United States has been closing very rapidly. It depends on which technology you look at. So, if you look at the kind of green technologies, China is clearly in the lead both with respect to the technology and cost. If you look at Gen AI models, it's very close," he said.
AI is undoubtedly the hottest topic in global technological innovation and is regarded as a focal point of competition between China and the U.S.
Leaders of top American companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD and Nvidia, all agree that the race is extremely intense.
According to the AI Index Report, an annual publication by Stanford University, China and the U.S. each possess distinct strengths in specific areas.
In 2024, the report said, U.S.-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models, compared to China's 15. While the U.S. maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap: performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024. Meanwhile, China continues to lead in AI publications and patents.
"Another trend that's important, and China is centrally important, is the expanding area of open-source Gen AI models. So that being that significant because we're going to get a mix of these closed and open models and the global marketplace will decide. But it certainly increases the accessibility of these technologies to a much wider range of countries that can't be in the business of developing. It's just too expensive," he said.
"I think it's obvious that China and the United States are the main, the dominant developers of these technologies because the infrastructure and scale and talent requirements are so large. At this point, the two countries are really the only plausible players. That could change in the future. Europe could change direction. India, at some point, will be big enough as an economy to be a major player in this. So it's not a permanent condition, but it is kind of where we are right now," said Spence.
China-US gap in AI race is closing: Nobel laureate
