Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai says US-China AI competition is not ‘winner takes all’

China-US competition in artificial intelligence should not be viewed as a winner-takes-all race; rather, it is a marathon where the technology is adopted in different ways in work and life, according to Joe Tsai, the chairman of Alibaba Group Holding.

“When it comes to AI, there’s no such thing as winning the race. I think it’s a long marathon,” Tsai, also chairman of the South China Morning Post, said at an event hosted by the American podcast All-In last month. The video and audio of the event were published on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the Post.

Tsai said the winner in AI should not be defined as “who comes up with the strongest AI model”, but on “who can adopt it faster”. China’s path of developing cost-effective open-source AI models was “conducive to faster adoption” compared with the US approach of pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing trillion-parameter models, according to Tsai.

“I’m not saying China technologically is winning the model war, but in terms of the actual application and also people benefiting from AI, it has made a lot of development,” Tsai said. He cited a survey that showed the percentage of Chinese businesses using AI had increased to 50 per cent this year from 8 per cent last year.

His comments come as American and Chinese tech giants are spending huge amounts on AI infrastructure and computing resources.