探访中国AI：美国难挡其崛起之势

I Went to China to See Its Progress on A.I. We Can’t Beat It.

我实地调研了中国AI发展，美国在这场较量中难占上风

In 2022, the Biden administration tried to arrest China’s development of artificial intelligence by denying it cutting-edge semiconductors. President Trump has relaxed that policy a bit without a clear plan to replace it.

2022年，拜登政府曾试图以断供高端芯片来制约中国AI产业。特朗普上台后虽略微放宽了限制，却未提出清晰的应对策略。

But the chip export controls have failed. China’s tech sector is too sophisticated to be stopped from building powerful A.I. In pursuing an impossible objective, the United States is missing an opportunity to try for one that sounds fanciful but which, after a recent reporting trip to China, I believe is more realistic: America should negotiate with China a global pact on A.I. safety, which would impose universal limits on a technology that can do much good — but, in the wrong hands, would do much harm.

然而芯片禁运策略已然失效。中国科技生态成熟完善，根本无法阻挡其打造顶尖AI系统。在执着于不可为之事时，美国错过了更可行的选择：尽管看似乌托邦，但经此趟中国调研，我认为更具操作性的是——美中应缔结全球AI安全公约，为这项能行善亦能作恶的技术设立统一规范。

The premise of the export restrictions was that the United States would be able to successfully block China’s access to powerful A.I. chips. The premium chip sets used in A.I. data centers are the size of skateboards and can’t be smuggled in a simple suitcase, and it’s hard to put them to use without hands-on support from the chipmakers’ engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their A.I. models on chips located in other countries. A Chinese model builder needs only to rent capacity on an A.I. data center in one of China’s Southeast Asian neighbors. Concealing the model’s Chinese origin is straightforward.

禁运的前提是美方真能切断中国获取高端AI芯片的渠道。这类用于数据中心的顶级芯片体积堪比滑板，难以偷偷运送，且缺乏厂商技术支持也难以部署。但中方工程师转而利用境外芯片训练模型，只需在东南亚邻国的数据中心租赁算力资源，便可轻松隐藏模型的中国来源。而且掩盖模型的中国