There are plenty of authoritarians in the US to conduct warfare against our institutions that are up to speed. We don't need to wait for anyone else overseas to get this party started.
I'm curious why you'd think that. China as a country has many people to start. Some percentage of these people will end up in AI. Assuming people from all countries are roughly equally intelligent, the numbers clearly favor China. Universities over there are quite good, there's a pretty strong "work hard" mentality I see from all our Chinese students. Plenty of Chinese graduating or starting university these days during the AI hype peak. China as a country isn't sleeping on AI either. I think China as an AI hub looks quite promising. Anecdotally, China also retains quite a lot of talent or people go abroad to study and return to China. Compared to some European countries or India that "leak" a lot of talent to the U.S. I think China is quite a bit more stable.
On the hardware side, things tend to be produced there as well.
China definitely "leaks" a lot of talent to American companies - most AI papers that I've seen from respected Western universities include at least one Chinese name.
One challenge for China has been the university enrollment rate. While in Western countries half of each cohort has been going to university for decades, China is not there yet. In 2019, just 17% of Chinese adults have degrees compared to 44% in the US.
So the large Chinese population is offset by its relative lack of access to education, while the US can draw from its own highly educated population in addition to attracting the best and the brightest from the rest of the world, including China.
