Series ・ 10 parts

The Race for AI: America, China, and the Battle for Intelligence

Giving a machine a mind — that audacious dream began with one mathematician's question. In 1956, at a summer workshop, the term 'artificial intelligence' was born. But after the euphoria came two long winters.

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01 The Dream of Building a Mind — The Birth of AI and Its Long Winters Giving a machine a mind — that audacious dream began with one mathematician's question. In 1956, at a summer workshop, the term 'artificial intelligence' was born. But after the euphoria came two long winters.
02 The Deep Learning Revolution — The Shock of 2012 In 2012, at an image-recognition competition, conventional wisdom was overturned. The long-neglected neural network rose to the top by an overwhelming margin. Vast data, gaming chips, and a few tenacious researchers—three forces met, and the long winter came to an end.
03 China's Awakening — AlphaGo and a National Plan In the spring of 2016, a program in Seoul defeated the reigning human champion at the game of Go. Across the sea, a great power received that moment as its own Sputnik shock. This is the story of AlphaGo's impact, China's 2017 national plan, and the rise of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent — the decisions that placed AI at the heart of China's bid for global power.
04 Data, the New Oil — Surveillance and Advantage The strategic resource of the twenty-first century was not oil sleeping underground, but data pouring out of people's smartphones. This is the story of an age when the source of power shifted to data: the advantage that the data of a billion lives gave China, the tension with a surveillance society that lay behind it, and the contrast with an America that led in algorithms and talent.
05 The Heart of Intelligence ― GPUs and the Chokehold of Silicon Even with data—the new oil—in hand, no intelligence is born without a furnace to burn it in. This is the story of the GPUs that power AI's computation, of Taiwan's TSMC, which controls their manufacture, and of how the export controls launched by the United States tightened their grip on the throat of China's AI.
06 The Shock of Generative AI ― ChatGPT and Foundation Models In late 2022, AI left the laboratory and leapt into the palms of people the world over. A single chat window drew in a million users in five days and a hundred million in two months. This is the story of how large language models, foundation models, and the race toward AGI became a new focal point of supremacy.
07 The Battle of the Rules — Regulation and Governance Once generative AI swept across the world, the contest for power moved into a new phase. The question was no longer what the technology could do, but who would set the rules. Europe sought to bind it by risk, the United States lurched between decree and reversal, and China chose to govern even the ideas it produced. A quiet struggle had begun over standards, and over the values they embodied.
08 Decoupling — The Technological Sphere Splits in Two The United States kept the most advanced semiconductors out of China's reach and drew its allies into the cordon. Squeezed, China bet on building its own. A single smartphone startled the world, talent was fought over, and the technological world that had once been one slowly tore into two.
09 Intelligence and Power — The Military, Surveillance, and Society AI is no longer merely a tool of the economy. On the battlefield it selects targets; online it generates lies indistinguishable from the truth; on the street it identifies a face in an instant. When intelligence becomes bound up with power, what does humanity gain, and what does it begin to fear? The story of supremacy is redrawing the very shape of society.
10 Beyond the Supremacy of Intelligence — AGI and Humanity's Choice An intelligence that may match, and eventually surpass, the human — AGI. Both its timing and its impact are matters on which views differ widely. In an age when the US and China vie for dominance and low-cost new models shake the market, humanity faces a question that neither oil nor semiconductors ever posed. How is this source of power to be governed? The finale.