What is AI For?

Writing on X, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand states that China has won the AI race because it has vastly more data centers already than the US can produce, quite apart from the PRC-backed efforts to quash American construction of data centers. The PRC has got Inner Mongolia:

[T]his tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.

And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.

In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.

He goes on to estimate the size of that capacity in the low millions of racks, or a thousand times larger than Elon Musk's proposed "Colossus" facility.

AI's contribution to the current wars has chiefly been in targeting, where it has proven effective. However, having all your eggs in one basket -- even so remote a basket as Inner Mongolia -- creates a problem if the intent was to fight a war against a power like the United States. We could disrupt such a thing on the first day of open conflict, within the first hour or so most likely.

I doubt that is what the PRC wants the stuff for anyway. The biggest fear of an authoritarian tyranny is always its own people. All that compute is probably being used chiefly to run domestic monitoring, tracking, and social credit systems. 

The PRC's spy chief admits their concerns in an openly-published article in a top Chinese cyber journal.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

The article goes on to worry about domestic unrest from deepfakes and so forth. The regulation they want is first and foremost about protecting the stability of Communist control over their own system. We rate a mention, but only towards the end (and only in terms of 'maintaining competition,' which is again about maintaining stability rather than tipping over the existing system). 

Likely as not our own domestic apparatus is more focused on military applications, but the domestic control aspect is still there: all those Flock cameras aren't about beating the Russians or the Red Chinese, after all.