Discipline Beats Dreams: China’s Quiet Advantage in AI
Discipline Beats Dreams: China’s Quiet Advantage in AI
Silicon Valley prays for godlike AGI while Beijing ships useful AI at scale. Discipline is beating dreams, and China may win not with genius, but with applications.
Be honest: America is chasing a prophecy while China is shipping product. Wall Street billions and gigawatts aimed at AGI meet Beijing’s AI+ mandate for practical tools, and results now, not someday.
I see two playbooks. In the U.S., Meta, Google and OpenAI pour capital into scale, a congressional “Manhattan Project” is floated, and GPT-5 still underwhelms as Sam Altman softens timelines.
In China, Xi Jinping drives applications: an $8.4B state fund, city-level AI+ plans, smaller data centers, and open-source models to cut costs. DeepSeek powers Xiong’an’s farming advice, weather forecasts, policing, and the 12345 hotline; Tsinghua rolls out an AI-assisted hospital; robots run dark factories.
Export controls block bleeding-edge chips, so China optimizes implementation; U.S. universities may keep an edge by spreading know-how, but only if leaders demand outcomes, not oracles.
My question: if your roadmap faced Xi’s test: “strongly oriented toward applications,” what would ship in 90 days, and which moonshots would you cut today?
Read the full article on Wall Street Journal.
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Dr. Mark van Rijmenam
Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is The Digital Speaker, a world-leading futurist and global AI keynote speaker who helps leaders decide what AI, and the technologies that follow it, mean for their business. He speaks to leadership teams at their retreats and to conference audiences worldwide, and his WAVE framework gives them a way of deciding that they keep using long after he has left the room. His Intelligence Age Scorecard measures how ready an organization is across the four WAVE pillars.
He holds a PhD from the University of Technology Sydney, is a Certified Speaking Professional and Global Speaking Fellow, and ranks among the world’s top futurists on the Global Gurus list (#1 in 2025, #3 in 2026). Salesforce named him one of its 16 leading AI voices. He has written six books, most recently Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change, writes the Synthetic Minds newsletter on Substack, and founded Futurwise. Talk to his digital twin on WhatsApp: +1 (830) 463-6967.
