A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI

One estimate suggests that OpenAI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry.

When I went to the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese AI company Moonshot AI, the first thing I saw was a piano with a vinyl copy of the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

It was part of a fun office theme: Moonshot AI co-founder Yang Zhilin is very into rock music, so every conference room is named after a band. We crowded into the “Radiohead” conference room to talk to a group of Moonshot researchers.

The piano in the Moonshot AI office. Moonshot AI is named after “The Dark Side of the Moon.” (Photo by Kai Williams)

I was on the third day of a 10-day trip across China. With a group of other writers and researchers, I visited several of the most prominent Chinese AI companies.¹