Andrew Ng: Chinese AI teams' open-source approach is closing the gap with the U.S.

On July 21, Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain, said in an interview with the Berggruen Institute that years ago he never imagined China would ultimately become more open than the United States in AI innovation. He noted that at the time of ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, the U.S. still clearly led China, but since then, China has rapidly narrowed the gap by betting on open-source and open-weight ecosystems. Numerous Chinese teams have not only published research papers publicly but also released models for free, making them available to developers worldwide. Today, top U.S. AI teams are extensively reading Chinese papers and adopting their technological innovations. In Ng’s view, AI knowledge sharing between China and the U.S. is becoming bidirectional, but China’s progress in open-weight models is particularly notable, enabling Chinese AI technologies to spread faster and be adopted by global enterprises, including those in the U.S.