China still lags behind the US in artificial intelligence (AI) chips, but the country is rapidly catching up in algorithms amid an intense technological race between the world’s two largest economies, according to renowned computer scientist Harry Shum Heung-yeung.
AI competition encompassed three key aspects: chips, algorithms, and applications – and the US was “clearly” still “far ahead” in chip technology, said Shum, council chairman at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, at an economic summit hosted by the University of Hong Kong Business School on Friday.
He said the gap China faced in chip production “cannot be bridged in one or two years”, and that computing power remained a significant challenge for companies in mainland China and Hong Kong.
To address these constraints, Shum – Microsoft’s head of AI and research until 2020 – suggested that China should focus on breakthroughs in algorithm engineering.
“China is following very closely in algorithms, and DeepSeek is a good example,” Shum said. The start-up achieved results comparable to top US competitors using only about 10,000 AI chips, in contrast to the hundreds of thousands required by companies like OpenAI and Google, despite facing significant challenges, he said.
DeepSeek, based in China’s new tech hub of Hangzhou, gained global attention earlier this year by releasing two large language models that matched the performance of their Western counterparts while being developed at much lower costs.
