The field of AI technology should not be seen as a zero-sum game arena, but as a model of international cooperation. Though China is under strict technology blockade by the United States, cooperation between AI scientists in both countries and industries still yields gratifying breakthroughs. Geopolitical or ideological considerations should not be an excuse to hinder international cooperation in AI technology, as cooperation will not only promote technological improvement and benefit mankind, but also help address the common challenges that AI brings to all countries, writes Ying Xue. The author is a research fellow of Xinhua Institute.
Some Western media use the term “arms race” to describe the AI technology competition between China and the United States. This term once again recalls the tense atmosphere of the military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
However, if we carefully examine the world today, we will find that the field of AI technology is not a zero-sum game arena, but should become a model of international cooperation. Because only with sufficient international cooperation in the field of AI technology can we humans enjoy the benefits of AI and avoid the disasters it brings.
Cooperation between AI scientists in China and the United States may be far greater than some people imagine. On January 31, an academic paper that shocked the world again was submitted. A group of US researchers including Chinese-American Feifei Li, a world-leading AI technology pioneer, and Stanford PhD student Niklas Muennighoff, an undergraduate graduate from China’s Peking University, trained a high-performing AI reasoning model using open-source technology from Alibaba Group’s Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct.
They trained their S1 reasoning model with a cost of less than 50 US dollars. Only a small dataset of 1,000 questions was used during the training which used test-time scaling approach. The result showed that their S1 model performed as well as the OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek’s R1 in mathematics and programming ability tests.