OpenAI blew everyone on this planet out of the water with its surprise Sora text-to-video AI service, which has forced China’s entire AI industry to work out how to deal with this, as it has the country feeling like they’ve lost a battle they thought they had a huge chance in.
China has been at the forefront of the global AI race, but the country has been on the baback footince the release of ChatGPT back in 2022 by OpenAI, and now text-to-video Sora is teased… China is speechless. It thought it was succeeding in AI, but it’s so far away it’s not even in the game.
The country has countless storage and data to feed into its AI, with functions like facial recognition being superior to many countries. But, the huge advancements in generative AI by other countries — the US for example — using text, images, and videos… have changed the AI completely, putting China in a very lagging light.
China can’t get its hands on high-end AI GPU hardware, with US export restrictions stopping high-end NVIDIA AI GPUs like the H100 and upcoming H200 not available in China, they’re banned. Even the gaming-focused GeForce RTX 4090 is nixxed from the country, forcing a cut-down RTX 4090D into China.
China-based Huawei is working on its own chips, but they don’t compete against NVIDIA… that isn’t some secret; it’s obvious. NVIDIA dominates AI GPUs, period. Nothing any other company is doing is close to them, and it’ll be a while before they can get close. China knows this. The United States knows this. AI GPUs truly are the new weapons of war. Meta’s chief scientist said in December 2023 that NVIDIA is “supplying weapons for the ongoing AI war”.
Zhou Hongyi, the founder of Chinese internet security firm 360 Security Technology, which is working on its own ChatGPT-style Large Language Model (LLM), said that OpenAI’s introduction of Sora was like a “barrel of cold water poured down China’s head. It cools down the heads of many people, forcing us to see the gap with leaders overseas“.
The report from SCMP reads: “The country’s best AI players are already a number of years behind their American peers in generative AI, an area in which Beijing’s self-trumpeted internet governance model looks like a liability. In one knee-jerk response to Sora this week, Beijing asked its most trusted state-owned enterprises to take a lead on AI. The State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission on Monday urged firms under direct control of the central government to ’embrace the profound changes brought about by AI’. Ten of these firms were designated as champions to promise AI, but the watchdog did not name the selected companies“.
