China will mobilise the country’s resources to spur advances in the theory and core technologies of artificial intelligence, President Xi Jinping has told the Communist Party’s inner circle.
Addressing a Politburo study session on Friday, Xi said China would leverage its “new whole national system” to target bottlenecks such as high-end chips, state media reported on Saturday.
China is seeking to overtake the United States in AI to become a world leader in a field seen as critical to moving the country up the industrial value chain.
Despite some progress, much work still needed to be done in China to “achieve self-reliance” in the field, Xi added.
“We must acknowledge the technological gap, redouble our efforts to comprehensively push forward technological innovation, industrial development and applications, and the AI regulatory system,” state news agency Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.
“[China should] continue to strengthen basic research, and concentrate on conquering core technologies such as high-end chips and basic software, so as to build an independent, controllable, and collaborative AI basic software and hardware system.
“[We should then] use AI to lead the paradigm shift in scientific research and accelerate scientific and technological innovation breakthroughs in various fields.”
China would also work with countries in the Global South to build AI capacity and bridge the global intelligence divide, he said.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the US and China have engaged in a feverish race in a field seen as the next big front in their global competitiveness.
China’s hopes of dominating the sector were dimmed by US limits on exports of high-end chips but Chinese players have narrowed the AI development gap over the past year.
Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the world in January with its R1 chatbot, matching the performance of its US competitors at a much lower cost.
The world’s two leading economies are also locked in an escalating tit-for-tat trade battle triggered by US President Donald Trump’s new levies on Chinese goods, which have reached 145 per cent on many products. Beijing has responded with new 125 per cent duties on imports from the United States.
Source: https://www.scmp.com
