Zelo preprost odgovor na to vprašanje je: Ker so KItajci naredili odprtokodni sistem za razvoj UI in ker so bolj odprti do aplikacij UI, zato bodo te aplikacije bolj široko vpeljali in uporabili. Arnaud Bertrand je bil v spodnjem komentarju članka v Financial Timesu glede tega zelo plastičen: iznajdba parnega stroja sama po sebi ni bila nič posebnega, kar jo je naredilo pomembno, je aplikacija parnega stroja v industriji in transportu, kar je povzročilo industrijsko revolucijo in omogočilo Britaniji, da se je gospodarsko izjemno razvila in pridobila prednost pred vsemi ostalimi.

This is rare enough to be highlighted: an actually good Financial Times article on the state of the AI “race” between the U.S. and China.

Three interesting points that stood out to me:

1) The fact that “for a general-purpose technology such as AI, long-term advantage often comes down to how widely and deeply technologies spread across society.”

This is because, at the risk of pointing the obvious, benefits from a new technology come from using it widely, not just creating it. You wouldn’t get any benefit from discovering the steam engine in and of itself: what drove productivity gains (and ultimately Britain’s advantage in the industrial revolution) was spreading and using this technology in its society.

And China has advantages here, as the article notes, since they’re unarguably better at orchestrating society-wide transformation, as that’s all they’ve been doing for the past 3 decades.

2) The point that US semiconductors export controls actually helped China in AI since they “pushed Chinese companies towards a different playbook: pooling compute, optimising efficiency and releasing open-weight models.”

This is extremely ironic as the US effectively pushed China to develop models that are a) more efficient (since operating under constrains the U.S. doesn’t have) and b) open-source (since China has constrained compute).

Which turns out to be the better strategy for global diffusion: if you’re a company in say Germany or Brazil, you can download Qwen or Deepseek, run it locally, fine-tune it for your market, and never worry about API rate limits (and worry less about costs since the models are more efficient and you don’t have an AI unicorn taking a cut every time you run a query).

3) The oft-ignored point of societal enthusiasm. As the article notes: “The public in China [is] the most optimistic in the world about AI — far more than in the US or the UK… Optimism can be a powerful fuel”

I often lament about this as a European: we often have a doomist take on new technologies (AI very much included), which is a huge repellent for entrepreneurship and technological diffusion. And that ultimately hurts Europe a lot in many ways, precisely because of the first point above: advantages from new technologies come down to how widely and deeply it spreads in society.

If China is the most enthusiastic country in the world about AI, this in and of itself will help drive the widespread adoption that, per point 1, is what actually matters for long-term competitive advantage.