China's AI Ambitions: Rapid Progress and Potential Risks Highlighted at Global AI Summit

China's former UK ambassador clashes with 'AI godfather' at summit

The pair's heated exchanges were a symbol of global political jostling in the powerful AI arms race, but Fu Ying also expressed regret about the negative impact of current hostilities between the US and China on the progress of AI safety. "At a time when the science is going in an upward trajectory, the relationship is falling in the wrong direction and it is affecting unity and collaboration to manage risks," she said. "It's very unfortunate." She gave a carefully-crafted glimpse behind the curtain of China's AI scene, describing an "explosive period" of innovation since the country first published its AI development plan in 2017, five years before ChatGPT became a viral sensation in the west. She added that "when the pace [of development] is rapid, risky stuff occurs" but did not elaborate on what might have taken place. "The Chinese move faster [than the west] but it's full of problems," she said. Fu Ying argued that building AI tools on foundations which are open source, meaning everyone can see how they work and therefore contribute to improving them, was the most effective way to make sure the tech did not cause harm. Most of the US tech giants do not share the tech which drives their products.

Global AI Summit: China Moves Faster, but It's Full of Problems, Warns Ex-UK Envoy Fu Ying

Although Chinese AI models have closed the performance gap with American ones, they have fallen behind in terms of safety. Ahead of the Paris AI Summit on Monday, the former Chinese ambassador to the U.K., Fu Ying, described the country's explosive AI innovation in recent years, arguing that Chinese developers "move faster" than their Western peers. However, Ying acknowledged that that speed may come at a cost, as Chinese AI is "full of problems." Although last month's release of DeepSeek R1 turned the world's attention to Chinese AI, Ying said the country has enjoyed an "explosive period" of innovation since 2017, when the government published its AI development plan . That plan laid out national goals and the state's development strategy through 2030, underscored by four "basic principles" that have shaped Beijing's AI policy in the years since: Open-Source Driving Chinese AI Innovation After eight years, it is possible to see how Beijing's four principles manifest in today's leading Chinese AI models Most notably, the country's open-source AI scene has made significant progress, with DeepSeek R1 and Alibaba's Qwen series achieving performance results that rival even the best proprietary American models. During the Paris panel, Ying argued that open-source AI offers "better opportunities to detect and solve problems," adding that "the lack of transparency among the giants makes people nervous." Speed, Safety, and Transparency The flipside to the rapid performance gains achieved by Chinese AI models is that they have started to fall behind their American and European peers in terms of safety. In comments shared with CCN, the CEO of Enkrypt AI Sahil Agarwal pointed to research his company carried out which found that DeepSeek R1 was less safe and secure than models created by OpenAI and Anthropic. For instance, it was 4.5 times more likely than OpenAI's o1 to generate functional hacking tools. Agarwal warned that the "AI arms race between the U.S. and China" was leading to potentially dangerous security vulnerabilities as both nations compete for technological supremacy. In Paris, Agarwal's concerns were echoed by Professor Yoshua Bengio, who countered Ying's view by arguing that China's open-source AI models could be more prone to misuse. That being said, Bengio acknowledged that the innate transparency of open models means it is easier to identify issues with DeepSeek's R1 than it is with proprietary models like OpenAI's.