China's pursuit of AGI and General Purpose Robots should not be Underestimated

China's edict on humanoid General Purpose Robots is a sign of things to come.

Pictured: Elon Musk: Elon Musk has visibly and noticeably gotten closer with China since Tesla’s investment in its Shanghai gigafactory there.

Hey Everyone,

There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding that Silicon Valley and Microsoft funded OpenAI are light years ahead of China when it comes to human level A.I., corporate AGI (distinct from actual AGI) and general purpose robotics (GPR).

As Chinese startups like Baichuan and Zhipu evolve, Kai-Fu Lee’s LLM startup looks pretty good as well. This in a world where Alibaba and Baidu are already doing rather impressive things in the Cloud with foundational LLMs.

Kai-Fu Lee, the computer scientist known in the West for his bestseller AI Superpowers (Book) and in China for his bets on artificial intelligence unicorns, has a new venture and it is called 01.AI. The company has reached a valuation of more than US$1 billion after a funding round that included Alibaba’s cloud unit, Lee said in an interview.

The company’s Yi-34B, which is a bilingual (English and Chinese) base model trained with 34 billion parameters and significantly smaller than other open models like Falcon-180B and Meta Llama2-70B, came in first amongst pre-trained LLM models, according to a ranking by Hugging Face.

Apparently, 01.AI’s model outperforms Meta’s Llama 2 on certain metrics. How could this be? I thought China was at least one year behind the U.S. in LLMs? Apparently this may not be totally accurate. There will be areas where China is making serious progress and it’s not really public yet.

If you have followed how serious China has become in the EV automobile market, you understand how serious China will become in the era of large language models and more capable robots, including how China’s military will usher in a new era of automation, drone swarms and Quantum sensing.

The United States understands how advanced China actually is, though the Silicon Valley tech media is hush on it.

Never before has artificial intelligence mattered so much to geopolitics and geopolitics mattered so much in the future of technology.

After the US switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, it’s now in 2023 directly starting to fund them. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, FMF has been used to send around $4bn of military aid to Kyiv, it’s now with an $80 million loan turned on the tap for Taiwan. This is happening under a programme called foreign military finance (FMF). The probability that China will attempt to militarily invade Taiwan in the next five years is likely near 65%.

China’s pursuit of corporate AGI and General Purpose Robots has military implications that in all the debate and discussion around x-risk we aren’t really talking about.

Elon Musk with a Tesla plant in Shanghai, has quickly become an ally of sorts of China. The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (pictured above) described Rishi Sunak's decision to invite China to the Bletchley Park summit as "essential." In the trinity of potential conflicts of Israel, the Ukraine and Taiwan, Taiwan has the largest bearing on the future of America and its potential impact on the global economy, future of democracy and China’s role in global affairs.

The competition towards smarter LLMs and more capable robots has a direct impact on the future of if we will have a unipolar world dominated by the United States for decades to come or if China will be able to continue its rise economically and technologically, inspite of several serious challenges and rising geopolitical tensions.

Building a robot that’s both human-like and useful is a decades-old engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction. China just prioritized this above other national goals.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, just gave guidelines concerning these new kinds of robots.