Comment by ajam1507
2 days ago
It doesn't have to be a race, that's just the way we have been treating it so far. There have been examples in the past of civilization ending technology that has been redirected from being a death race (chemical, biological, and nuclear arms in particular.)
China doesn't regard AI as a death race. It regards it as a way to ensure its own global stature and benefit its own population.
> China doesn't regard AI as a death race. It regards it as a way to ensure its own global stature and benefit its own population.
I'm curious about where you get this information from? I'd love to get links to some (Chinese) articles that paint this picture, if you have them.
China has stricter regulations on models than the US. For example you can't release a model if the hallucination rate is above a certain threshold.
The US hasn't fully woken up to the fact yet that the race to superintelligence is a death race. China (population, members of the government, academics, lab employees) could also just not have fully grasped it yet. I'm personally confident that it will be possible to explain it to them.
> China has stricter regulations on models than the US. For example you can't release a model if the hallucination rate is above a certain threshold.
I wasn't aware of that, so I checked - and indeed, there are some firm regulations there, just not exactly the one you're describing:
- a new generative AI must pass a security assessment and be filed with the "Cyberspace Administration of China" before launch, tested against GB/T 45654-2025, which has hard numeric thresholds:
training corpus ≥96% compliant on manual inspection (≥98% technical), sources with >5% illegal/harmful content can't be collected at all, generated content ≥90% pass rate, ≥95% refusal on questions that must be refused, ≤5% false refusals.
The moment in which hallucination factors into this hard 90% threshold is Risk A.5.a ("inaccurate content grossly inconsistent with scientific knowledge"). The standard explicitly states however, that this risk applies when the model is used for specific service types with higher safety requirements, such as critical information infrastructure, automatic control, medical information services, psychological counseling, and financial information services. Everywhere else, accuracy is a best-effort obligation.
source: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-gen-ai-safety-...
Not sure nuclear arms is a great example. There are more countries with nuclear weapons now than in 1970. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all joined the nuclear club since then. The SALT and START treaties are no longer in effect.
Perhaps CFCs (Montreal Treaty) is a better example of international cooperation to solve a potential extinction-level event, though it was never a "race" in the same sense.
even if both sides agree to a pause china will annihilate the us in the robotics race (for which there will be no slowdown). software/llms is america's only edge