A high-ranking Chinese official explains why China may cooperate in trying to control the pace of development of LLM AI and why such plans won’t succeed in one neat package. Carol Yang reports at the South China Morning Post:
China’s top intelligence official has warned of rising national security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI), calling for robust risk prevention frameworks and stronger global governance of the emerging technology.
The call from Chen Yixin, China’s state security minister, comes as Beijing seeks to play a leading role in global AI governance while criticising US restrictions. At the Brics summit in India over the weekend, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an AI-powered initiative to drive new industrialisation and deepen supply chain cooperation in the emerging economies bloc.
Chen underscored Beijing’s view of the technology as a key geopolitical battleground. AI has become “a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers”, he wrote for China Cyberspace, a journal run by internet watchdog body the Cyberspace Administration of China.
The aspects of the matter are:
- China has reasons to fear uncontrolled AI because of regime security.
- China also has enormous incentives to exploit AI for strategic advantage.
- The United States faces analogous strategic incentives.
- The technology and expertise are already too widely distributed for an agreement between two governments to control development reliably.
Consequently, even if the U. S. and China reach an agreement to slow the pace of development there are quite literally millions of people in the U. S. and China with the knowledge, training, abilities, and resources to keep right on developing it and reasons to do so.
Feel lucky, punk?
