中国人工智能进步加速，正缩小与美国差距
不是中国开发者在美国技术的基础上开发，而是美国开发者在中国技术的基础上开发
- 7 min read
China Is Closing the A.I. Gap With the United States
MEAGHAN TOBIN, CADE METZ
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this month, start-up founder Qu Dongqi showed off a video he had recently posted online. It displayed an old photograph of a woman with two toddlers. Then the photo sprang to life as the woman lifted the toddlers up in her arms and they laughed with surprise.
本月在上海举行的世界人工智能大会上，创业公司创始人曲东奇（音）展示了他最近发布在网上的一段视频，上面是一个女人和两个蹒跚学步的孩子的老照片。然后，照片仿佛有了生命，女人把孩子们抱在怀里，孩子们惊喜地笑了。
The video was created by A.I. technology from the Chinese internet company Kuaishou. The technology was reminiscent of a video generator, called Sora, that the American start-up OpenAI unveiled this year. But unlike Sora, it was available to the general public.
该视频是由中国互联网公司快手的人工智能技术制作的。这项技术让人想起美国初创公司OpenAI今年推出的一款名为Sora的视频生成器。但与Sora不同的是，快手的技术面向公众开放。
“My American friends still can’t use Sora,” Mr. Qu said. “But we already have better solutions here.” “我的美国朋友仍然用不上Sora，”曲东奇说。“但我们已经有了更好的解决方案。”
While the United States has had a head start on A.I. development, China is catching up. In recent weeks, several Chinese companies have unveiled A.I. technologies that rival the leading American systems. And these technologies are already in the hands of consumers, businesses and independent software developers across the globe.
虽然美国在人工智能发展方面领先一步，但中国正在迎头赶上。最近几周，几家中国公司推出了与美国领先系统相媲美的人工智能技术，而且已经可以供全球消费者、企业和独立软件开发者取用。
While many American companies are worried that A.I. technologies could accelerate the spread of disinformation or cause other serious harm, Chinese companies are more willing to release their technologies to consumers or even share the underlying software code with other businesses and software developers. This kind of sharing of computer code, called open source, allows others to more quickly build and distribute their own products using the same technologies.
许多美国公司担心人工智能技术可能会加速虚假信息的传播或造成其他严重伤害，但中国公司更愿意向消费者发布他们的技术，甚至与其他企业和软件开发商共享底层软件代码。这种计算机代码的共享被称为开源，让其他人可以使用相同的技术，更快地构建和发布他们自己的产品。
Open source has been a cornerstone of the development of computer software, the internet and, now, artificial intelligence. The idea is that technology advances faster when its computer code is freely available for anyone to examine, use and improve upon.
开源一直是计算机软件、互联网以及现在的人工智能发展的基石。其理念是，如果计算机代码可供任何人免费查看、使用和改进，技术就会进步得更快。
China’s efforts could have enormous implications as A.I. technology continues to develop in the years to come. The technology could increase the productivity of workers, fuel future innovations and power a new wave of military technologies, including autonomous weapons.
随着人工智能技术在未来几年继续发展，中国的努力可能会产生巨大影响。这项技术可以提高工人的生产力，推动未来的创新，并可以驱动包括自主武器在内的新一波军事技术。
When OpenAI kicked off the A.I. boom in late 2022 with the release of the online chatbot ChatGPT, China struggled to compete with technologies emerging from American companies like OpenAI and Google. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.) But China’s progress is now accelerating.
2022年底，OpenAI推出在线聊天机器人ChatGPT，开启了人工智能热潮，当时中国很难与OpenAI和谷歌等美国公司推出的技术竞争。（《纽约时报》已起诉OpenAI及其合作伙伴微软，称其侵犯了与人工智能系统相关的新闻内容的版权。）但中国的进步正在加速。
Kuaishou released its video generator, Kling, in China more than a month ago and to users worldwide on Wednesday. Just before Kling’s arrival, 01.AI, a start-up co-founded by Kai-Fu Lee, an investor and technologist who helped build Chinese offices for both Google and Microsoft, released chatbot technology that scored nearly as well as the leading American technologies on common benchmark tests that rate the performance of the world’s chatbots.
一个多月前，快手在中国发布了视频生成器可灵，并于周三向全球用户开放。就在可灵发布之前，由曾经帮助谷歌和微软创建中国公司的投资者和技术专家李开复参与创立的初创公司零一万物发布了聊天机器人技术，在评估全球聊天机器人性能的通用基准测试中，该技术的得分几乎与美国领先技术相当。
New technology from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba has also leaped to the top of a leaderboard that rates open-source A.I. systems. “We have disproved the commonplace belief that China doesn’t have the talent or the technology to compete with the U.S.,” Dr. Lee said. “That belief is simply wrong.”
中国科技巨头阿里巴巴的新技术也跃居开源人工智能系统排行榜榜首。“我们推翻了中国不具备与美国竞争的人才或技术这一普遍看法，”李开复说。“这种想法是完全错误的。”
In interviews, a dozen technologists and researchers at Chinese tech companies said open-source technologies were a key reason that China’s A.I. development has advanced so quickly. They saw open-source A.I. as an opportunity for the country to take a lead.
在接受采访时，中国科技公司的十几名技术专家和研究人员表示，开源技术是中国人工智能发展如此迅速的一个关键原因。他们认为，开源人工智能是中国取得领先地位的机会。
But that will not be easy. The United States remains at the forefront of A.I. research. And U.S. officials have resolved to keep it that way.
但这并不容易。美国仍处于人工智能研究的前沿。美国官员决心保持这种状态。
The White House has instituted a trade embargo designed to prevent Chinese companies from using the most powerful versions of computer chips that are essential to building artificial intelligence. A group of lawmakers has introduced a bill that would make it easier for the White House to control the export of A.I. software built in the United States. Others are trying to limit the progress of open-source technologies that have helped fuel the rise of similar systems in China.
白宫已实施了贸易禁运，旨在阻止中国企业使用对构建人工智能至关重要的最强大计算机芯片。一群立法者提出了一项法案，使白宫更容易控制美国制造的人工智能软件的出口。还有一些人试图限制那些有助于类似系统在中国兴起的开源技术。
The top American companies are also exploring new technologies that aim to eclipse the powers of today’s chatbots and video generators.
美国顶级公司也在探索新技术，旨在超越当今聊天机器人和视频生成器的能力。
“Chinese companies are good at replicating and improving what the U.S. already has,” said Yiran Chen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “They are not as good at inventing something completely new that will bypass the U.S. in five to 10 years.”
“中国公司擅长复制和改进美国已有的东西，”杜克大学电气和计算机工程教授陈怡然说。“他们不擅长发明在五到10年内越过美国的某种全新的东西。”
But many in China’s tech industry believe that open-source technology could help them grow despite those constraints. And if U.S. regulators stifle the progress of American open-source projects (as some lawmakers are discussing) China could gain a significant edge. If the best open-source technologies come from China, U.S. developers could end up building their systems atop Chinese technologies.
但中国科技行业的许多人认为，尽管存在这些限制，开源技术仍能帮助他们发展。如果美国监管机构扼杀美国开源项目的发展（就像一些立法者正在讨论的那样），中国可能会获得显著的优势。如果最好的开源技术来自中国，美国开发者最终可能会在中国技术的基础上构建他们的系统。
“Open-source A.I. is the foundation of A.I. development,” said Clément Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face, a company that houses many of the world’s open-source A.I. projects. The U.S. built its leadership in A.I. through collaboration between companies and researchers, he said, “and it looks like China could do the same thing.”
“开源人工智能是人工智能发展的基础，”抱抱脸公司(Hugging Face)首席执行官克莱蒙德·德朗格说，世界上许多开源人工智能项目在使用这家公司的平台。他说，美国通过企业和研究人员之间的合作，建立了人工智能领域的领导地位，“看起来中国也可以做同样的事情。”
While anyone with a computer can change open-source software code, it takes a lot of data, skill and computing power to fundamentally alter an A.I. system. When it comes to A.I., open source typically means that a system’s building blocks serve as a foundation that allows others to build something new, said Fu Hongyu, the director of A.I. governance at Alibaba’s research institute, AliResearch.
虽然任何拥有电脑的人都可以修改开源软件代码，但要从根本上改变一个人工智能系统，需要大量的数据、技能和算力。阿里巴巴旗下研究机构阿里研究院的人工智能管理负责人傅宏宇说，就人工智能而言，开源通常意味着一个系统的构建模块可以作为基础，让其他人可以构建新的东西。
As in other countries, in China there is an intense debate over whether the latest technological advances should be made accessible to anyone or kept as closely held company secrets. Some, like Robin Li, the chief executive of Baidu, one of the few companies in China building its own A.I. technology entirely from scratch, think the technology is most profitable and secure in the hands of a limited few.
与其他国家一样，在中国，关于最新的技术进步究竟应该向所有人开放，还是作为严格保密的公司机密，一直存在着激烈的争论。百度是中国少数几家完全从零开始开发自己的人工智能技术的公司之一，其首席执行官李彦宏以及其他一些人认为，人工智能技术掌握在少数人手中才是最有利可图的，也是最安全的。
A.I. systems require enormous resources: talent, data and computing power. Beijing has made it clear that the benefits accruing from such investments should be shared. The Chinese government has poured money into A.I. projects and subsidized resources like computing centers.
人工智能系统需要大量资源：人才、数据和算力。中国政府已明确表示，应分享此类投资带来的利益。中国政府向人工智能项目投入了大量资金，并对计算中心等资源进行了补贴。
But Chinese tech companies face a major constraint on the development of their A.I. systems: compliance with Beijing’s strict censorship regime, which extends to generative A.I. technologies.
但中国科技公司在开发人工智能系统方面面临着一个重大限制：遵守北京严格的审查制度，这种制度也延伸到生成式人工智能技术。
Kuaishou’s new video generator Kling appears to have been trained to follow the rules. Text prompts with any mention of China’s president, Xi Jinping, or controversial topics like feminism and the country’s real estate crisis yielded error messages. An image prompt of this year’s National People’s Congress yielded a video of the delegates shifting in their seats.
快手的新视频生成器可灵似乎已经接受了遵守规则的训练。任何提及中国国家主席习近平，或女权主义以及中国房地产危机等争议性话题的文字提示都会产生错误信息。输入今年全国人民代表大会的图片提示，最终生成了代表们在座位上移动的视频。
Kuaishou did not respond to questions about what steps the company took to prevent Kling from creating harmful, fake or politically sensitive content.
对于该公司采取了哪些措施来防止可灵制作有害、虚假或政治敏感内容的问题，快手没有做出回应。
By making their most advanced A.I. technologies freely available, China’s tech giants are demonstrating their willingness to contribute to the country’s overall technological advancement as Beijing has established that the power and profit of the tech industry should be channeled toward the goal of self sufficiency.
通过免费提供最先进的人工智能技术，中国的科技巨头们表明他们愿意为国家的整体技术进步做出贡献，因为北京已经确定，科技产业的力量和利润应该用于实现自给自足的目标。
The concern for some in China is that the country will struggle to amass the computing chips it needs to build increasingly powerful technologies. But that has not yet prevented Chinese companies from building powerful new technologies that can compete with U.S. systems.
一些中国人担心，中国将难以积累构建日益强大的技术所需的计算芯片。但这并没有阻止中国公司开发出与美国系统竞争的强大新技术，。
At the end of last year, Dr. Lee’s company, 01.AI, was ridiculed on social media when someone discovered that the company had built its A.I. system using open-source technology originally built by Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. Some saw it as a symbol of China’s dependence on American ingenuity.
去年年底，李开复的公司零一万物在社交媒体遭到嘲讽，当时有人发现该公司使用最初由Facebook和Instagram的所有者Meta开发的开源技术构建人工智能系统。一些人认为这是中国依赖美国聪明才智的象征。
Six months later, 01.AI unveiled a new version of its technology. It now sits near the top of the leaderboard that ranks the world’s best technologies. Around the same time, a team from Stanford University in California unveiled Llama 3-V, claiming it outperformed other leading models. But a Chinese researcher soon noticed that the model was based on an open-source system originally built in China.
6个月后，零一万物推出了一款新技术。如今，它在世界最佳技术排行榜上名列前茅。大约在同一时间，加州斯坦福大学的一个团队发布了Llama 3-V，声称它的性能优于其他领先模型。但一位中国研究人员很快注意到，该模型是基于最初在中国建立的开源系统。
It was the reverse of the controversy surrounding 01.AI last year: Rather than Chinese developers building atop U.S. technology, U.S. developers built atop Chinese technology.
这与去年围绕零一万物的争议正好相反：不是中国开发者在美国技术的基础上开发，而是美国开发者在中国技术的基础上开发。
If regulators limit open-source projects in the United States and Chinese open-source technologies become the gold standard, Mr. Delangue said, this kind of thing could become the norm.
德朗格说，如果监管机构限制美国的开源项目，而中国的开源技术成为黄金标准，这类事情可能会成为常态。
“If the trend continues, it becomes more and more of a challenge for the U.S.,” he said.
“如果这种趋势继续下去，对美国来说，这将成为越来越大的挑战，”他说。
Meaghan Tobin是时报科技记者，常驻台北，报道亚洲地区的商业和科技新闻，重点关注中国。 Cade Metz撰写有关人工智能、无人驾驶汽车、机器人、虚拟现实和其他技术新兴领域的新闻。点击查看更多关于他的信息。 翻译：纽约时报中文网