China’s race to develop smarter-than-human artificial intelligence may put it ahead of the U.S., but such ground-breaking technology could also risk lessening the stronghold that the ruling Communist Party has over the world’s second-largest economy. That’s the view of prominent AI scientist Max Tegmark, who told CNBC artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer than we think and the narrative of a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China racing to build the smartest AI is a “suicide race.” While there is no singular definition of AGI, it is broadly taken to refer to AI that can outsmart humans. Applications like ChatGPT — that allow users to prompt a chatbot for answers — have exploded in popularity. But many AI companies are racing to develop the next level, with AI that has human-level intelligence. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said that AGI could be achieved by 2025. While there are other major names in the tech sector who also think AGI is close, many others think true AGI is still very far away.

Full report : China is currently enacting a balancing act between pushing forward with artificial intelligence innovation while keeping control over the technology’s development.