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This is almost certainly not true. China sees AI as priority, you need computers for AI hence they're going to be supporting indigenous chip production.
AI has been noted as a priority in the most recent 5 year plan, but that is talk.
Chinese tech companies have been corralled and restrained, starting with Jack Ma and the Ant group. You might say that they aren't AI companies. This would be mostly right. AI hasn't had great success in being monetized in it of itself. Companies like Google and Meta can pay for research and large amounts of compute which need not be profitable by the way of their other businesses. Even OpenAI, is getting investment from Microsoft (as a former employee, I've talked to an intern working on fine tuning GPT3). The real estate bubble popping and the zero covid policy put more strain on tech companies in the midst of their humbling.
Let's look on the three things needed for AI R&D (besides money): data, compute, and human talent/capital.
China as a society gathers a ton of data. The state and companies collect a lot. The question is how much of that is available to researchers. Despite the Chinese advantage in data collection, most of human genetics research uses the UK biobank dateset. Researchers in firms like Alibaba and Tencent are bound to have some good stuff.
China has received a ban on buying advanced compute. It's domestic industry has been hard hit, and received no state support to keep them propped up. YMCA didn't get it's billion dollar deal with Apple to supply memory. On the design front, China has some companies. Their electronics industry in general is good and that includes design. I'm aware of Moore Threads designing GPUs, but haven't looked into other compute hardware (there was a x86 CPU a couple of years back, but that was in partnership with AMD, so it might be dead now).
China has a lot of good engineers, being an AI researcher and engineer is one of the most sought after careers due to the high compensation. That said, a lot of them, especially the very talented, head over to the USA.
As for money, tech companies are hurting right now, and I don't know the state of funding in academia.
Yes, AI needs compute. Where you're wrong is that the support for domestic chips ain't here. The companies are bleeding money and can't wait forever for state help. They're conducting layoffs as we write.
Is it not true that Chinese are running a lot of AI aided surveillance of people in cities ?
I mean stuff like facial and gait recognition, that's what we know of. I believe it's fairly widespread.
Yeah, but using existing tools does not research make. Some money has gotta be flowing from the gov to the vendors supplying the software. This ain't the same as funding fundamental research or subsidizing industry.
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