In January, as business and government leaders descended on Davos, Switzerland, for this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum, the prevailing wisdom was that American tech giants were winning the race for dominance in artificial intelligence while China, and indeed the whole of Asia, lagged behind.
Among the assembled cognoscenti, the outlook for China’s AI companies ranged from bleak to downright dismissive. The share prices of America’s “Magnificent Seven” hovered at all-time highs while Chinese tech stocks languished, dragged down by perceptions that Beijing’s heavy-handed regulation was strangling innovation. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea weren’t generally considered leaders in AI, and the experts saw Southeast Asian economies as too small, too poor, and too fragmented to be anything more than bit players.
