A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI

One estimate suggests that OpenAI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry.

This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

“This lack of access to compute is probably the most important structural factor in the development of Chinese AI today.”

When I went to the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese AI company Moonshot AI, the first thing I saw was a piano with a vinyl copy of the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

It was part of a fun office theme: Moonshot AI co-founder Yang Zhilin is very into rock music, so every conference room is named after a band. We crowded into the “Radiohead” conference room to talk to a group of Moonshot researchers.

The piano in the Moonshot AI office. Moonshot AI is named after “The Dark Side of the Moon.” (Photo by Kai Williams)

I was on the third day of a 10-day trip across China. With a group of other writers and researchers, I visited several of the most prominent Chinese AI companies.¹