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Opinion | Risk of censorship to China’s AI leadership ambitions is overblown
- Those who see censorship as an insurmountable obstacle overlook or underestimate the potential of industry-oriented large language models, AI’s importance to Beijing and Chinese firms’ ingenuity
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The Communist Party’s stringent censorship regime has often been cited as a hindrance to China’s ambitions of global artificial intelligence (AI) leadership. Such assessments, however, are overblown.
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The argument goes that tight party controls over the information space would hinder the development and roll-out of large language models (LLMs): advanced AI models designed for natural language processing.
Notably, it is difficult to control the output of these models, and relatively simple to “trick” them into spewing unwanted words and phrases, such as criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Censorship has thus often been framed as a key determinant in the US-China race for global AI leadership.
What this framing misses, however, is that censorship constrains only one application of LLMs: public-facing chatbots. In reality, the myriad applications of the technology that would provide the bulk of the economic and military gains from AI are not subject to the so-called political alignment problem.
An example is Huawei’s Pangu Mine Model – a mining-specific model created with Shandong Energy Group that enhances activities such as rock burst prevention and tunnelling by making them safer, reducing labour intensity and increasing efficiency.
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One capability involves analysing camera signals on the ropes fastened to the tail of a mine car and generating alarms when anomalies are detected. Such functions do not run a risk of subverting the party line because they have no “output” in the traditional sense.
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