Computer geeks Tang Jie and Yang Zhilin were mere teacher and pupil more than a decade ago, with dreams of building a machine that could think like a human. Today, they are two of the Chinese artificial-intelligence tycoons who have U.S. AI pioneers looking over their shoulders with alarm.
Tang, a professor at Tsinghua University, co-founded Z.AI, one of the companies hot on the heels of Anthropic and https://archive.ph/o/JWJfC/https://www.wsj.com/topics/subject/openai in capability and global usage. Yang, whom Tang once nominated for his university’s top academic award, leads another, Moonshot AI. Each company is valued at tens of billions of dollars.
The rapid rise of Chinese AI models has sparked a host of questions in both Silicon Valley and Washington. How did Chinese AI labs get so far so fast? Where did their AI models come from? Are companies like Tang’s and Yang’s https://archive.ph/o/JWJfC/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claims-alibaba-ran-brazen-campaign-to-access-its-claude-ai-model-69d7a392, and should their products be banned to protect American national security?
The careers of Tang and Yang show that China’s AI push is nothing sudden. Tang, 49, has been working on machine learning for about a quarter-century. More than a decade ago, he was among the Chinese AI experts already at the forefront of using computers for humanlike tasks such as understanding language and recognizing faces.
Tang, Yang and their fellow researchers—many of whom got started at Tsinghua and a few other institutions—make up a virtual Silicon Valley in China’s tech centers. Knowledge flows easily between them thanks to a culture of publishing research and the Chinese developers’ preference for open-source technologies that are largely free for download and modification.
To catch up in the era of generative AI, Chinese companies have relied on the familiar mix of ingenuity and imitation that also lies behind the nation’s successes in electronics, cars and green energy. Chinese AI developers https://archive.ph/o/JWJfC/https://www.wsj.com/business/china-silicon-valley-sea-turtles-tech-ai-talent-46385d38 and closely followed advances in the U.S.
More controversially, some appear to have “distilled” U.S. models to help train their own faster, employing a process in which a new system learns from an existing one by asking it hundreds of thousands of questions and analyzing the answers.
Anthropic https://archive.ph/o/JWJfC/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-accuses-chinese-companies-of-siphoning-data-from-claude-63a13afc, including both Z.AI and Moonshot, of violating its policies by engaging in large-scale distillation. Neither company has commented on the issue. People working at Chinese model developers acknowledge that distillation is widespread globally and that some Chinese companies might use it more aggressively than American counterparts.
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