The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently said that China filed 38,000 artificial intelligtion-related generative AI patents from 2014-23, while the United States filed 6,276 of the 50,000 patents filed by all countries. Of the 50,000 applications, 25 percent were filed last year.The top five inventor regions are: China (38,210 inventions), the United States (6,276 inventions), the Republic of Korea (4,155 inventions), Japan (3,409 inventions) and India (1,350 inventions).

On Monday, executives from the three major chip giants in the US - Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia - met with US officials, including Antony Blinken, to voice their opposition to the Biden administration's plan of imposing further restrictions on chip sales to Chinese companies and investments in China. The Semiconductor Industry Association also released a similar statement, opposing the exclusion of US semiconductor companies from the Chinese market. First of all, we mustn't believe that the appeals of these companies and industry associations will collectively change the determination of US political elites to stifle China's progress. These US elites are very fearful of China's rapid development, and they see "chip chokehold" as a new discovery and a successful tactic formed under US leadership and with the cooperation of allies. Currently, the chip industry is the most complex technology in human history, with only a few companies being at the forefront. They are mainly from the Netherlands, Taiwan island, South Korea, and Japan, most of which are in the Western Pacific. These countries and regions are heavily influenced by the US. Although these companies have their own expertise, they still use some American technologies in their products. Therefore, Washington quickly persuaded them to form an alliance to collectively prevent the Chinese mainland from obtaining chips and manufacturing technology. Washington is proud of this and wants to continuously tighten the noose on China. The New York Times directly titled an article "'An Act of War': Inside America's Silicon Blockade Against China, " in which an American AI expert, Gregory Allen, publicly claimed that this is an act of war against China. He further stated that there are two dates that will echo in history from 2022: The first is February 24, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, and the second is October 7, when the US imposed a sweeping set of export controls on selling microchips to China. China must abandon its illusions and launch a challenging and effective counterattack. We already have the capability to produce 28nm chips, and we can use "small chip" technology to assemble small semiconductors into a more powerful "brain," exploring 14nm or even 7nm. Additionally, China is the world's largest commercial market for commodity semiconductors. Last year, semiconductor procurement in China amounted to $180 billion, surpassing one-third of the global total. In the past, China had been faced with the choice between independent innovation and external purchases. Due to the high returns from external purchases, it is easy for it to become the overwhelming choice over independent research and development. However, now the US is gradually blocking the option of external purchases, and China has no strategic choice but to independently innovate, which in turn puts tremendous pressure on American companies. Scientists generally expect that, although China may take some detours, such as recently apprehending several company leaders who fraudulently obtained subsidies from national semiconductor policies, China has the ability to gradually overcome the chip difficulties. And we will form our own breakthroughs and industrial chain, which is expected to put quite a lot of pressure on US companies. If domestic firms acquire half of China's $180 billion per year in chip acquisitions, this would provide a significant boost for the industry as a whole and help it advance steadily. The New York Times refers to the battle on chips as a bet by Washington. "If the controls are successful, they could handicap China for a generation; if they fail, they may backfire spectacularly, hastening the very future the United States is trying desperately to avoid," it argued. Whether it is a war or a game, when the future is uncertain, what US companies hope for most of all is that they can sell simplified versions of high-end chips to China, so that the option of external purchases by China continues to exist and remains attractive. This can not only maintain the interests of the US companies, enabling them to obtain sufficient funds to develop more advanced technologies, but also disrupt China's plans for independent innovation. This idea is entirely based on their own commercial interests and also has a certain political and national strategic appeal. Hence, there is no shortage of supporters within the US government. US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen seems to be one of them, as she has repeatedly stated that the US' restrictions on China will not "fundamentally" hurt China, but will only be "narrowly targeted." The US will balance its strict suppression on China from the perspective of maintaining its technological hegemony, while also leaving some room for China, in order to undermine China's determination to counterattack in terms of independent innovation. China needs to use this mentality of the US to its advantage. On the one hand, China should continue to purchase US chips to maintain its economic fundamentals, and on the other hand, it should firmly support the development of domestic semiconductor companies from both financial and market perspectives. If China were to continue relying on exploiting the gaps in US chip policies in the long term, akin to a dependency on opium, it would only serve to weaken China further as it becomes increasingly addicted. China's market is extremely vast, and its innovation capabilities are generally improving and expanding. Although the chip industry is highly advanced, if there is one country that can win this counterattack, it is China. As long as we resolutely continue on the path of independent innovation, this road will definitely become wider. Various breakthroughs and turning points that are unimaginable today may soon occur.

Chat means chat, and GPT is the acronym for Gene Rate Pre trained Transformer. Genrative means generation, and its function is to create or produce something new; Pre trained refers to a model of artificial intelligence that is learned from a large amount of textual materials, while Transformer refers to a model of artificial intelligence. Don't worry about T, just focus on the words G and P. We mainly use its Generative function to generate various types of content; But we need to know why it can produce various types of content, and the reason lies in P. Only by learning a large amount of content can we proceed with reproduction. And this kind of learning actually has limitations, which is very natural. For example, if you have learned a lot of knowledge since childhood, can you guarantee that your answer to a question is completely correct? Almost impossible, firstly due to the limitations of knowledge, ChatGPT is no exception, as it is impossible to master all knowledge; The second is the accuracy of knowledge, how to ensure that all knowledge is accurate and error free; The third aspect is the complexity of knowledge, where the same concept is manifested differently in different contexts, making it difficult for even humans to grasp it perfectly, let alone AI. So when we use ChatGPT, we also need to monitor the accuracy of the output content of ChatGPT. It is likely not a problem, but if you want to use it on critical issues, you will need to manually review it again. And now ChatGPT has actually been upgraded twice, one is GPT4 with more accurate answering ability, and the other is the recent GPT Turbo. The current ChatGPT is a large model called multimodality, which differs from the first generation in that it can not only receive and output text, but also other types of input, such as images, documents, videos, etc. The output is also more diverse. In addition to text, it can also output images or files, and so on.

China is mulling over establishing a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) standardization technical committee under its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), aiming to guide enterprises to enhance industrial standards and boost domestic innovation. The proposed committee, revealed by the MIIT on Monday, will work on composing a BCI standards roadmap for the entire industry development as well as the standards for the research and development of the key technologies involved, according to the MIIT. China has taken strides in developing the BCI industry over the years, not only providing abundant policy support but also generous financial investment, Li Wenyu, secretary of the Brain-Computer Interface Industrial Alliance, told the Global Times. From last year to 2024, both the central and local governments have successively issued relevant policies to support industrial development. The MIIT in 2023 rolled out a plan selecting and promoting a group of units with strong innovation capabilities to break through landmark technological products and accelerate the application of new technologies and products. The Beijing local government also released an action plan to accelerate the industry in the capital (2024-2030) this year. In 2023, there were no fewer than 20 publicly disclosed financing events for BCI companies in China, with a total disclosed amount exceeding 150 million yuan ($20.6 million), Li said. “The strong support from the government has injected momentum into industrial innovation.” The fact that China's BCI industry started later than Western countries such as the US is a reality, leading to the gap in China regarding technological breakthroughs, industrial synergy, and talent development, according to Li. To further close gaps and solve bottlenecks in BCI industrial development, Li suggested that the industry explore various technological approaches to suit different application scenarios and encourage more medical facilities powered by BCI to initiate clinical trials by optimizing the development of BCI-related ethics. Additionally, he highlighted that standard development is one of the aspects to enhance the overall level and competitiveness of the industry chain, which could, in turn, empower domestic BCI innovation. While China's BCI technology generally lags behind leading countries like the US in terms of system integration and clinical application, this has not hindered the release of Neucyber, which stands as China's first "high-performance invasive BCI." Neucyber, an invasive implanted BCI technology, was independently developed by Chinese scientists from the Chinese Institute for Brain Research in Beijing. Li Yuan, Business Development Director of Beijing Xinzhida Neurotechnology, the company that co-developed this BCI system, told the Global Times that the breakthrough of Neucyber could not have been achieved without the efforts of the institute gathering superior resources from various teams in Beijing. A group of mature talents were gathered within the institute, from specific fields involving electrodes, chips, algorithms, software, and materials, Li Yuan said. Shrugging off the outside world's focus on China’s competition with the US in this regard, Li Yuan said her team doesn’t want to be imaginative and talk too much, but strives to produce a set of products step by step that can be useful in actual applications. In addition, Li Wenyu also attributed the emergence of Neucyber to the independent research atmosphere and the well-established talent nurturing mechanism in the Chinese Institute for Brain Research. He said that to advance China’s BCI industry, it is necessary not only to cultivate domestic talents but also to introduce foreign talents to enhance China's research and innovation capabilities. The proposed plan for establishing the BCI standardization technical committee under the MIIT will solicit public opinions until July 30, 2024.

A couple of days ago, a Quad summit meeting in Sydney scheduled for May 24 was abruptly canceled. The US president had to pull out of his long-anticipated trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Instead, the heads of the four Quad member states got together on the margins of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima on May 20. The main reason for the change of plans was the continuous struggle between the White House and Republicans on the Hill over the national debt ceiling. If no compromise is reached, the US federal government might fail to meet its financial commitments already in June; such a technical default would have multiple negative repercussions for the US, as well as for the global economy and finance at large. Let us hope that a compromise between the two branches of US power will be found and that the ceiling of the national debt will be raised once again. However, this rather awkward last-minute cancellation of the Quad summit reflects a fundamental US problem - a growing imbalance between the US geopolitical ambitions and the fragility of the national financial foundation to serve these ambitions. The Biden administration appears to be fully committed to bringing humankind back to the unipolar world that existed right after the end of the Cold War some 30 years ago, but the White House no longer has enough resources at its disposal to sustain such an undertaking. As they say in America: You cannot not have champagne on a beer budget. The growing gap between the ends that the US seeks in international relations and the means that it has available is particularly striking in the case of the so-called dual containment policy that Washington now pursues toward Russia and China. Even half a century ago, when the US was much stronger in relative terms than it is today, the Nixon administration realized that containing both Moscow and Beijing simultaneously was not a good idea: "Dual containment" would imply prohibitively high economic costs for the US and would result in too many unpredictable political risks. The Nixon administration decided to focus on containing the Soviet Union as the most important US strategic adversary of the time. This is why Henry Kissinger flew to Beijing in July 1971 to arrange the first US-China summit in February 1972 leading to a subsequent rapid rapprochement between the two nations. In the early days of the Biden administration, it seemed that the White House was once again trying to avoid the unattractive "dual containment" option. The White House rushed to extend the New START in January 2021 and held an early US-Russia summit meeting five months later in Geneva. At that point many analysts predicted that Biden would play Henry Kissinger in reverse - that is he would try to peace with the relatively weaker opponent (Moscow) in order to focus on containing the stronger one (Beijing). However, after the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it became clear that no accommodation with the Kremlin was on Biden's mind any longer. Still, having decided to take a hard-line stance toward Moscow and to lead a broad Western coalition in providing military and economic assistance to Kiev, Washington has not opted for a more accommodative or at least a more flexible policy toward Beijing. On the contrary, over last year one could observe a continuous hardening of the US' China policy - including granting more political and military support to the Taiwan island, encouraging US allies and partners in Asia to increase their defense spending, engaging in more navel activities in the Pacific and imposing more technology sanctions on China. In the meantime, economic and social problems within the US are mounting. The national debt ceiling is only the tip of an iceberg - the future of the American economy is now clouded by high US Federal Reserve interest rates that slow down growth, feed unemployment and might well lead to a recession. Moreover, the US society remains split along the same lines it was during the presidency of Donald Trump. The Biden administration has clearly failed to reunite America: Many of the social, political, regional, ethnic and even generational divisions have got only deeper since January 2021. It is hard to imagine how a nation divided so deeply and along so many lines could demonstrate continuity and strategic vision in its foreign policy, or to allocate financial resources needed to sustain a visionary and consistent global leadership. Of course, the "dual containment" policy is not the only illustration of the gap between the US ambitions and its resources. The same gap inevitably pops up at every major forum that the US conducts with select groups of countries from the Global South - Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America or the Middle East. The Biden administration has no shortage of arguments warning these countries about potential perils of cooperating with Moscow or Beijing, but it does not offer too many plausible alternatives that would showcase the US generosity, its strategic vision, and its true commitment to the burning needs of the US interlocutors. To cut it short, Uncle Sam brings lots of sticks to such meetings, but not enough carrots to win the audience. In sum, US foreign policy under President Joe Biden reminds people of a very advanced and highly sophisticated smartphone that has a rather weak battery, which is not really energy efficient. The proud owner of the gadget has to look perennially for a power socket in order not to have the phone running out of power at any inappropriate moment. Maybe the time has come for the smartphone owner to look for another model that would have fewer fancy apps, but a stronger and a more efficient battery, which will make the appliance more convenient and reliable.