China’s tech sector has a new obsession: competing with U.S. titans like Google and Microsoft in the breakneck global artificial intelligence race.
Billionaire entrepreneurs, midlevel engineers and veterans of foreign firms alike now harbor a remarkably consistent ambition: to outdo China's geopolitical rival in a technology that may determine the global power stakes. Among them is internet mogul Wang Xiaochuan, who entered the field after OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted to a social media firestorm in November. He joins the ranks of Chinese scientists, programmers and financiers — including former employees of ByteDance, e-commerce platform JD.com and Google — expected to propel some $15 billion of spending on AI technology this year.
For Wang, who founded the search engine Sogou that Tencent bought out in a $3.5 billion deal less than two years ago, the opportunity came fast. By April, the computer science graduate had already set up his own startup and secured $50 million in seed capital. He reached out to former subordinates at Sogou, many of whom he convinced to come on board. By June, his firm had launched an open-source large language model and it’s already in use by researchers at China’s two most prominent universities.
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