**Winner Takes All: The US-China Race To AI Mastery**

Winner Takes All: The US-China Race To AI Mastery

_Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,_ (https://www.theepochtimes.com/winner-takes-all-the-us-china-race-to-ai-mastery_5199237.html)

**_AI competition may prove to be the last technology race in the world..._**

?itok=ahaxvGeg (?itok=ahaxvGeg)

The AI-powered ChatGPT is intensifying the competition between the United States and China for artificial intelligence dominance.

**The stakes couldn’t be higher.**

For the sake of clarity, ChatGPT is the AI-driven tool that can create documents, reports, and other content with just a question or a few key words. It was created by OpenAI, a Bay Area technology firm started by tech standouts such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other tech luminaries.

The good news is how ChatGPT has brought the race for AI dominance back into the national conversation. The potential for AI technology to alter our world is difficult to overstate, even though ChatGPT technology itself barely scratches the surface of what AI technology can really do.

AI Will Transform Everything

Both the United States and China are fully engaged in efforts to master AI technology in its most powerful applications, which includes creating so-called “deep fakes” that put words into people’s mouths and put people in places they never were. Even those capabilities are mere shadows of what is to come.

In a few short years at most, the way we do even the most common tasks, from manufacturing goods, transporting them, and marketing them will be radically changed. Medicines, machines, and methodologies of inquiry will all be fundamentally different under AI. AI will change every activity or industry to which it is applied, and that includes rapid advancements in biotechnology and its transformational impact on warfare.

The AI Race Will Be the Last Race

The race for AI mastery isn’t the first time that nations have raced to achieve technological dominance in the world. The race to reach the moon comes to mind, but it was ideological almost as much as it was technological in its impact. The race to develop the first atomic bomb during the Second World War is a better comparison. Many observers believe that AI represents nothing less than a paradigm shift for the entire world and across the spectrum of industries and scientific applications.

That’s what makes AI a qualitatively different technology than all others. It will forever alter the relationship between humanity and machines. Humanity’s great innovation was the replication and transformation of the natural world into the mechanization and manipulation of it. It was only just over a century ago that mankind transitioned from horse to automobile, then on to flight, and then to space flight.

?itok=b2Eg0hWS (?itok=b2Eg0hWS)

_A visitor watches an AI sign on an animated screen at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona. (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)_

A concurrent shift occurred with the communication revolution, effectively compressing time and distance by the speed of light. This not only made the world smaller and events more impactful as they’re witnessed in real time, but it also shortened reaction times.

The AI revolution, however, is a quantum leap in technological advancement. AI is the actual dematerialization of machines and the separation of thought from humanity, neither of which has ever happened before. For the first time ever, mankind is threatened not just with destruction from a man-made device, but by our own creations replacing us altogether.

China’s Big Data and Surveillance

That’s no exaggeration. Philosopher Yuval Harari has warned of AI rendering humans as obsolete and “useless.” Harari isn’t the only one to see the red flags. Elon Musk has said that AI is “summoning the demon,” implying that once released, it will be beyond our control.

That remains to be seen. But both statements are a nod to the power that AI may well yield to those who first acquire the requisite level of skill and technology. Accordingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin observed that whoever masters AI will be master of the world.

He’s probably right, and the Chinese Communist Party has every intention of doing both.

?itok=3o1G4FHx (?itok=3o1G4FHx)

_A Chinese man plays online games at an internet cafe in Wuhan, China, in this file pho…

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/winner-takes-all-us-china-race-ai-mastery