A globally competitive AI workforce hinges on the education, development, and sustainment of the best and brightest AI talent. This issue brief provides an overview of the education systems in China and the United States, lending context to better understand the accompanying main report, “AI Education in China and the United States: A Comparative Assessment.”

Since the mid-2000s, China has consistently graduated more STEM PhDs than the United States, a key indicator of a country’s future competitiveness in STEM fields. This paper explores the data on STEM PhD graduation rates and projects their growth over the next five years, during which the gap between China and the United States is expected to increase significantly.

Summer camps are an integral part of many U.S. students’ education, but little is known about camps that focus on artificial intelligence education. This data brief maps out the AI summer camp landscape in the United States and explores the camps’ locations, target age ranges, price, and hosting organization type.

China wants to be a “cyber powerhouse” (网络强国). At the heart of this mission is the sprawling 40 km2 campus of the National Cybersecurity Center. Formally called the National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base (国家网络安全人才与创新基地), the NCC is being built in Wuhan. The campus, which China began constructing in 2017 and is still building, includes seven centers for research, talent cultivation, and entrepreneurship; two government-focused laboratories; and a National Cybersecurity School.

This issue brief explores whether artificial intelligence and AI-related certifications serve as potential pathways to enter the U.S. AI workforce. The authors find that according to U.S. AI occupation job postings data over 2010–2020, there is little demand from employers for AI and AI-related certifications. From this perspective, such certifications appear to present more hype than promise.

Growing popular and industry interest in high-performing natural language generation models has led to concerns that such models could be used to generate automated disinformation at scale. This report examines the capabilities of GPT-3--a cutting-edge AI system that writes text--to analyze its potential misuse for disinformation. A model like GPT-3 may be able to help disinformation actors substantially reduce the work necessary to write disinformation while expanding its reach and potentially also its effectiveness.

A lack of good data on the U.S. artificial intelligence workforce limits the potential effectiveness of policies meant to increase and cultivate this cadre of talent. In this issue brief, the authors bridge that information gap with new analysis on the state of the U.S. AI workforce, along with insight into the ongoing concern over AI talent shortages. Their findings suggest some segments of the AI workforce are more likely than others to be experiencing a supply-demand gap.

In May 2020, the White House announced it would deny visas to Chinese graduate students and researchers who are affiliated with organizations that implement or support China’s military-civil fusion strategy. The authors discuss several ways this policy might be implemented. Based on Chinese and U.S. policy documents and data sources, they estimate that between three and five thousand Chinese students might be prevented from entering U.S. graduate programs each year.

As the United States seeks to maintain a competitive edge in artificial intelligence, the strength of its AI workforce will be of paramount importance. In order to understand the current state of the domestic AI workforce, Diana Gehlhaus and Santiago Mutis define the AI workforce and offer a preliminary assessment of its size, composition, and key characteristics. Among their findings: The domestic supply of AI talent consisted of an estimated 14 million workers (or about 9% of total U.S. employment) as of 2018.

China operates a number of party- and state-sponsored talent programs to recruit researchers -- Chinese citizens and non-citizens alike -- to bolster its strategic civilian and military goals. CSET has created a tracker to catalog publicly available information about these programs. This catalog is a work in progress; if you have further information on programs currently not included in it -- or if you spot an error -- please complete the form at http://bit.ly/ChineseTalent