There are a lot of calls to keep AI out of the hands of China and/or maintain AI supremacy over China. This is related to government’s role in AI.
Policy opinions
On October 7, 2022, the US imposed restrictions on exporting NVIDIA GPUs to China in an effort to limit China’s ability to deploy the compute infrastructure need to train frontier models.1
Dario Amodei makes a good case for these sorts of sanctions in Machines of Loving Grace:2
Quote
AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries. […] My current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”26, in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment.
He goes on to analogize this to the US Atoms for Peace program which rewarded countries for playing ball and not doing business with countries that did not.
Sam Altman wrote an op-ed on this topic called A democratic vision for artificial intelligence must prevail over an authoritarian one that proposed some steps that the government could take in this effort (See government’s role in AI).
Technologies
NVIDIA is not allowed to sell its top-end GPUs to China as of 2022; for example, H100 is not available in China, but H20 is.
This has led China to develop its own indigenous AI accelerators including the Huawei Ascend 910C.