China’s artificial intelligence efforts are unlikely to catch up with the United States in the near term despite making significant headway in recent years, according to the country’s leading AI researchers. The comments at a major industry conference in Beijing on Saturday underscored the gap between the two countries in semiconductor chips and chipmaking equipment, key resources for building out the infrastructure needed for developing cutting-edge AI models. Lin Junyang, technical lead of Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen team, said there was a less than 20 per cent chance – already a “highly optimistic” estimate – that any Chinese company would surpass US tech giants such as Google DeepMind and OpenAI in the next three to five years due to “computational resources in the US being one to two orders of magnitude larger”.

Full report : China’s AI unlikely to surpass US soon despite progress, researchers say.