The Daily Planet #90: The AI Bubble, Part 15

AGI pilling seems like a uniquely American thing, perhaps even a Silicon Valley thing. Sitting in Boston, I don't hear as much about AGI nearby in comparison to Bay Area Substack. Not to lean too hard on anecdotal evidence, but it sure feels like AGI fervor decreases linearly with distance from Palo Alto.

There's also Embodied AI, which pursues AGI by implementing it in hardware that moves around the world, and doing so at scale. How important is embodiment to AGI? If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said: absolutely essential, but non-embodied Deep Learning techniques have made a lot of progress on tasks that I wouldn't have thought they would.

Still, it looks like the Chinese model of embedding AI everywhere in society, even if it's not the latest and greatest model, is betting on a form of embodiment as the winning pathway. If, as we saw last week, hyperscaler investment in data centers is the AI twist on cognitive capitalism, then China's investment in robotics and AI is the AI twist on manufacturing. In both cases, the respective nations are building on top of their existing strengths and market depth.

China's approach to artificial intelligence (AI) is distinctively different from that of the United States, reflecting the country's unique strengths and strategic priorities. While the U.S. excels in cloud computing, software development, and large language models, China focuses on AI systems that interact directly with the physical world through sensors and actuators. This emphasis aligns with China's robust manufacturing capabilities and extensive infrastructure, enabling large-scale deployment of AI in real environments such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and urban governance.

China's government has made embodied intelligence a key national priority, with cities like Zhongguancun and Wuhan spearheading projects that integrate AI with physical infrastructure. The country also pursues "brain-inspired AI," exemplified by the China Brain project, which aims to mimic human cognition and learning processes.

I'm not so sure about brain-inspired AI tbh; mimicking human cognition hasn't been a winner for AI and in any case, what does this mimicking mean?

Robotics is another area where China leads, operating the world's largest stock of industrial robots and developing humanoid robots equipped with advanced AI and 5G connectivity. Overall, China's AI path leverages its manufacturing prowess and infrastructure to create AI tightly integrated with the physical world, offering a complementary and competitive model to the U.S.'s cloud-based AI development.

I have barely scratched the surface of Chinese AI documents, but from what I have seen, State Directed Embodied AI will surely rack up some successes, but it will also have its share of hot air. There are snake-oil salesmen on both sides of the Pacific!

China's Diverging AI Path