On Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping had his first in-person appearance at his country’s biggest artificial intelligence event, the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. In his long-awaited debut speech, Xi called for more open-source AI and cooperation across borders, taking a stance squarely opposite to his American counterpart, the tariff-loving President Donald Trump. “We often say in China, ‘A single string cannot make music, and a single tree does not make a forest,'” Xi told the crowd in Shanghai, per China Daily. “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.” Xi has reason to say this. China and the United States have been locked in a contest for global AI industry domination. With frontier American labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and the industry’s number one chip supplier, Nvidia, the United States has the lead for now. But Chinese companies are quickly bridging that gap, providing open models that can outperform some of American Big Tech’s closed offerings.
The shocking performance upgrades in some of these models have caused the Trump administration to take a stricter stance on AI trade with China, much to the dismay of chip giant Nvidia, which used to count China as one of its largest markets. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has advocated for the normalization of trade ties between the two superpowers, arguing that the wide prevalence of American technology abroad, particularly in China, would mean that their AI industry would be entirely dependent on American technology, ensuring American hegemony.
