BEIJING, Sept 16 (Reuters) – AI is not a “monopoly of great powers” and the U.S. should work with China to manage risk to create a non-discriminatory development environment, China’s top newspaper, the People’s Daily, said in a commentary on Wednesday.
The U.S. and China are the two major driving forces of frontier AI development and the technology’s global adoption. Both superpowers have been at loggerheads over AI policies and industry practices, with these issues slated to feature prominently in bilateral talks next week.
The White House earlier this year accused China of stealing U.S. artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property on an industrial scale.
AI is a new domain for human development and China encourages open-source and open practices, providing companies, including from the U.S., access to open-source models, the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily wrote in a commentary.
“Artificial intelligence is a new domain for human development, not a monopoly of great powers, and must not become an arena for zero-sum competition,” said the commentary published under the pen name “Zhong Sheng”, meaning “Voice of China” and often used to give views on foreign policy.
Reports disclose that U.S. companies extensively “distill” Chinese models, it added.
“According to U.S. logic, when American enterprises use distillation it is an ‘industry standard practice,’ while when Chinese enterprises apply it, it constitutes an ‘attack.’ This is naked double standards,” the paper said.
Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using the output of larger ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.
By elevating an industry standard practice to a national security issue, the U.S. seeks a monopoly over the industry under the guise of combating distillation, the commentary added.
However, China is willing to engage in “constructive and professional” discussions with the U.S. to advance the open, inclusive, universal, and beneficial development of AI, it said.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Writing by Ben Blanchard and Lincoln Feast.)
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