The United States has been leading China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, but that all changed on Christmas Day, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI.
Wang, a company that provides training data to major AI players including OpenAI, Google and metaAt the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI lab, announced the launch of DeepSeek-R1, a powerful inference-driven AI model, following the launch of its “earth-shattering model” on Christmas. , which competes with OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.
“What we found is that DeepSeek performs best, or is roughly on par with the best US models,” Wang said.
In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has much more. nvidia H100 GPU (an AI chip widely used to build leading AI models that is more powerful than people think, especially given US export controls)
Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach $1 trillion in revenue, just as the generative AI market is expected to surpass $1 trillion in sales within 10 years.
“The United States will need a huge amount of computational power and infrastructure,” Wang said, adding, “To create an AI boom, we need to radiate American energy.”
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure. This project, Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by President Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners include Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.
In an interview Thursday, Wang said he believed it would take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is a widely cited but vaguely defined benchmark used in the AI sector to represent a branch of AI-pursuing technology. Outperforms human intelligence on a wide range of tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic. Some leaders say we are close to achieving AGI, while others say it is completely impossible. Wang’s definition of AGI is “a powerful AI system that can use a computer like you or me and essentially become a remote worker in the most capable way possible.”
anthropology AmazonThe AI startup, founded by a former OpenAI research executive, has been ramping up its technology development over the past year and said in October that its AI agents can use computers to complete complex tasks like humans. Anthropic’s computer-enabled capabilities allow its technology to interpret the content of a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute actions across all software and real-time Internet searches, the startup said. .
The tool “basically lets you use computers the same way we use them,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can perform tasks in “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI is reportedly planning to introduce similar features soon.
When asked which US artificial intelligence startups are currently leading the AI race, Wang said each model has its own unique advantages. For example, OpenAI’s models are great at inference, while Anthropic’s models are great at coding.
“This space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.
Edit: This article has been updated to correct the name of DeepSeek’s inference-driven AI model DeepSeek-R1.
