I Met With China’s Top AI Experts. They’re Freaking Out, Too
Key takeaways
- It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement—the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely—to humanoid robots.
- But I left with one takeaway above all else: The US and China should put their fierce AI rivalry to the side.
- Frontier AI’s cybersecurity and systemic risks are too serious to ignore, and increasingly capable agentic models could soon cause chaos unless the world’s AI superpowers can work together.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s bustling high-tech district.
It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement—the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely—to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, who won the Turing Award with Rich Sutton for his pioneering work on reinforcement learning.
But I left with one takeaway above all else: The US and China should put their fierce AI rivalry to the side.