The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. William C. Hannas – professor at Georgetown University and lead analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) – and Huey-Meei Chang, CSET’s senior China S&T specialist and co-editor with Dr. Hannas of “Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives and Challenges” (Routledge 2023) – is the 488th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”

Identify salient myths and misinformation about China’s artificial general intelligence. 

Myths and misinformation about China’s quest for artificial general intelligence are as common as the misinformation “generated” by today’s large generative models. We’ll address a few such misconceptions, the first being the Chinese term for “AGI” itself.

“Artificial general Intelligence” is understood loosely as “the ability of an intelligent agent to learn any intellectual task that a human can.” Setting aside complications such as differences in human cognitive abilities and the difficulty of defining “G” or general intelligence itself, the concept and its associated term are broadly understood.

What about the Chinese term? Ben Goertzel, an AGI proponent who spent years in China, is credited with popularizing the term “AGI” in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, his colleague Pei Wang proposed the term 通用人工智能 – literally “general artificial intelligence” – to reference the same concept. Goertzel acknowledged later that he preferred the word-order of Wang’s term but stuck with “AGI” because he felt the acronym “GAI” might be misconstrued.

Now a lot has been said about differences between Western and Chinese visions of AI. And there are major divergences in China’s approach to AI that we will get into. But we shouldn’t get hung up on psycholinguistic nuances. Our team has studied thousands of Chinese AI documents and finds that the two terms – Chinese and English – are used interchangeably. In fact, it’s common to see “AGI” in parentheses after the Chinese term. So, let’s put that issue to rest. Both sides are talking the same endgame.