How to Do More with Less

7Competing with China

I don't think you can write a holistic book on AI without mentioning China. I already mentioned China in Chapter 2 when I talked about shopping in the United States versus China. We'll talk more about China in this chapter and how it is impeccably good at creating algorithms.

From Copycat to Being Copied

In 2017, I made a conscious decision to return to China after being born there but growing up in Canada. If you were of my parent's generation and part of the community who painstakingly immigrated to North America, you would have called me ridiculous. But even at that time, I could tell that China was on another path of development. And I had to see what they were doing. Sure enough, it was the most eye-opening experience of my life. It felt like I was living in the future.

You see, the Chinese internet system is a little different from the West. Most people in the West simply know that most Chinese internet users can't access Google and a lot of other companies' websites. Little do they know about the other players who have replaced those companies. There is an equivalent of Google, X, Meta, YouTube and every other blocked website. In fact, when the Chinese government blocked these sites, the opportunity came for domestic Chinese tech companies to rise up. In regard to AI, it is no different. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and a wealth of other AI apps are also blocked in China, mostly because it is synonymous to a search engine. Because China needs to operate ...