There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race

But now it appears that access to large quantities of advanced compute resources is no longer the defining or sustainable advantage many had thought it would be. In fact, the capability gap between leading US and Chinese models has essentially disappeared, and in one important way the Chinese models may now have an advantage: They are able to achieve near equivalent results while using only a small fraction of the compute resources available to the leading Western labs. The AI competition is increasingly being framed within narrow national security terms, as a zero-sum game, and influenced by assumptions that a future war between the US and China, centered on Taiwan, is inevitable. The US has employed "chokepoint" tactics to limit China's access to key technologies like advanced semiconductors, and China has responded by accelerating its efforts toward self-sufficiency and indigenous innovation, which is causing US efforts to backfire. Recently even outgoing US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a staunch advocate for strict export controls, finally admitted that using such controls to hold back China's progress on AI and advanced semiconductors is a "fool's errand."