Musk Says China Is Gunning For AI Dominance: Analyzing The US Stance On Regulation

After a two-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai, Tesla TSLA CEO Elon Musk said that China is planning to execute further government regulations on Artificial Intelligence technology.

In April, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a draft called "Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services," which followed up on regulations enforced in January on machine learning.

Musk has long been an advocate for finding tools to offset the dangers that AI poses to humankind. Regulation could serve this purpose, while also allowing for the development of a successful industry around AI use.

In a Twitter Spaces discussion with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Musk said that he and some of China's senior leaders “had some very productive discussions on artificial intelligence risks, and the need for some oversight and regulation.”

“My understanding from those conversations is that China will be initiating AI regulation,” said Musk, whose trip to China included meetings with the country's foreign, commerce and industry ministers as well as top Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang.

How The U.S. Is Losing The AI-Regulation Race

Dominating AI technology is increasingly becoming an issue of geopolitical importance. 

Recently, the U.S. banned the export to China of key semiconductors used in the training of AI systems, in an effort to hamper the country's development of this technology. China proceeded to ban some U.S.-made chips in its territory, in what some believe was a form of retaliation.

Yet, the U.S. is falling behind China and other regions in the deployment of regulation surrounding the groundbreaking technology. 

Two weeks ago, the Biden administration released a 56-page document analyzing the possible risks that AI could pose to U.S. citizens, as well as a blueprint for an “AI Bill of Rights,” aimed at guiding lawmakers in writing legislation to regulate this technology. Yet, these propositions from the executive branch are still far from garnering enough attention from the Congress.

Meanwhile, the European Union is already moving forward with a piece of legislation called the AI Act, that seeks to broadly regulate the technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman threatened that his company would leave the bloc if the legislation is too constraining for ChatGPT and its other products, QZ reported. The act was approved by a committee in the European Parliament and is currently being readied for a vote later this month.

"To date, there has been no serious consideration of a US analog to the EU AI Act or any sweeping federal legislation to govern the use of AI, nor is there any substantial state legislation in force," wrote attorneys from Goodwin Law in a review of the country's regulation of AI.

Last month, Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL CEO Sundar Pichai also called for more AI regulation, saying that the technology is "too important not to regulate well." 

While Musk's China visit presumably raised eyebrows in Washington, the country is the largest market for Tesla vehicles outside the U.S., and the CEO said after the visit that the two counties are like "conjoined twins." The billionaire opposed the ongoing process of "decoupling" between China and the West.

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What Makes China's AI Regulation Special

Part of the Chinese regulation presented in the draft released in April makes companies providing generative AI services to the public responsible for the outputs they produce, even when prompted by users and when used as APIs. This is a key controversial item that the EU, for instance, still has not agreed upon.

It also sets rules on the data used to train these models, according to a translation of the document by Stanford University's DigiChina magazine.

In January, China already set into place a piece of regulation overseeing the use of so-called "deep synthesis" technology: namely, deep learning and machine learning applied to generative images, texts, audio and video. This first piece of regulation didn't touch upon the data used to train the systems, while the new proposed rule does. 

Regulation is often seen as a hurdle to technological development. Yet, an effort to be the first to regulate AI could actually be a step by China to win the AI race. As Axios tech writer Ryan Heath points out, regulation can help build up public trust in AI, "which drives consumer uptake and spurs growth."

Regulation also allows the Chinese government to sow more control into the technology itself, preventing it from getting out of hand.

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