The promise of the AGI has become the “the wolf is coming” from some AI companies. The gurus of American AI companies do not stop hype with the long-awaited general artificial intelligencethe one that will surpass humans in all areas of knowledge. Meanwhile, In China it doesn’t seem to matter too much.
The AGI gap. Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman…everyone agrees that the AGI is about to fall, or so they have said at some point. We cannot know how close they are, what we do know is that to achieve AGI they need more computing power, for which they need a lot (more) money. The AGI as a justification for an insane investment.
They count in High Capacity that China barely mentions AGI in its 2025 AI+ initiative nor did it mention it in the ‘Next Generation AI Development Plan’ 2018. AI is a strategic technology of great importance, but they focus on specific applications such as industrial automation, autonomous driving or robotics. Transformative, yes, but not turning points that will change the world completely.
Whoever arrives first wins (or not). It’s American logic in this race. To achieve this, they are betting everything on one horse and AGI is the goal. If they arrive before, they will obtain an insurmountable economic and military advantage: they will have won. On the other hand, if China arrives before, the power relationship would change completely.
The truth is that things have to go a lot wrong for the US to not win this race. The problem is that, while they are making this titanic effort, China is beating them on other fronts such as the electric car, industrial robotics, drones, solar panels… Win the AI battle, but lose the economic war.
China is calm. Why aren’t China so excited about AGI? To begin with, it is not so clear that scaling the models is the fastest route to AGI and that requires a gigantic investment with no guarantees. But above all it is because they do not buy the idea of ”arriving first”; Even if the US overtakes them, they can simply copy them and catch up quickly. Yao Shunyu said itchief AI scientist at Tencent: “History shows that once a technical pathway is validated, Chinese teams can quickly replicate it and even surpass it in specific areas, such as electric vehicles or manufacturing.” The question is not so much who gets there first, but who makes the best use of it.
Who does talk about AGI in China. Yao Shunyu’s statements occurred within the framework of the AGI-Next Summit, where several leaders of Chinese AI companies met to talk about the future of the sector. Figures such as the founder of DeepSeek, the CEO of Ziphu or the founder of Moonshot have talked about their goal being to achieve AGI, although they have not shared many more details. Maybe the company that Alibaba has gone deeperwhich gave a presentation detailing its plans to achieve superintelligence (ASI).
These leaders, like those of American companies, may have commercial motivations in these statements, but there are other organizations in China that are investigating this field such as the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence or the Chongqing Institute for General AI. There are initiatives, but there is nowhere near the level of obsession that they have in the US.
A restful strategy. While the US hoards chips and scales like crazy, in China they are choosing to do it more slowly. They are prioritizing national chips and open source with the idea of promoting the adoption of their models. It is a more long-term vision. A long distance race, not a sprint.
Image | Steve Johnson in Unsplash
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