US-China rivalry overshadows Boao economic forum

Panellists allude to backdrop of great power competition affecting domains including Al

- Lim Min Zhang

BOAO, Hainan – The competition between China and the United States, including in new technology from artificial intelligence (AI) to electric vehicles (EVs), has cast a shadow on an international economic conference.

Panellists at the annual Boao Forum for Asia, which gathers government officials, business leaders and academics to discuss economic cooperation, alluded to the backdrop of great power competition that has increasingly affected domains ranging from economics to technology to climate cooperation.

A clear example is AI, where the February 2024 roll-out of AI-powered video generation tool Sora by the US-based OpenAI generated another round of debate in China about whether its AI innovation capabilities remain behind those of the US.

Asked about this at a session on AI-generated content, British computer scientist Stuart Russell, who is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said such AI competition is healthy, and the idea that it is a zero-sum game is “a huge mistake”, as all humans can benefit from the technology if it is safe and capable.

“In that sense, there is no point trying to compete over that technology. It’s like arguing who has more copies of a digital newspaper. It’s a pointless argument, because you can always make more if you need them,” said Professor Russell.

Professor Zeng Yi, director of the Brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation, refused to frame the issue in terms of US-China rivalry.