Run of the mill hn contrarian post but: I think this op-ed is premature, China has a number of structural advantages wrt. AI and some fairly obvious use-cases

Run of the mill hn contrarian post but: I think this op-ed is premature, China has a number of structural advantages wrt. AI and some fairly obvious use-cases that justify enormous investment and large scale deployment. It's no harder to make LLMs aligned with CCP ideology than it is to make them "safe" in the way ChatGPT is. In both cases the AI is trained to understand what are undesirable responses that will get it "cancelled". Censorship and social monitoring are killer use-cases for LLMs. Structurally the huge advantage China has over the west is that it is politically feasible to get all public and private communications fed into AI, with the dual purpose of monitoring communications and providing training data. The long-term questions around what this does to society and is that good or bad - that is harder. Is the "great firewall" a net plus for Chinese citizens or just a tool the CCP use to maintain order and control? A "great AI" seems inevitable but what will the 2nd and 3rd order effects be? Even if you think China will manage this poorly there is no reason to be smug about that; we will need to confront the question of the "AI police state" in the west before long. The pretexts here will of course be CSAM and terrorism.