West Debates AI's Future, Excluding Half the World

A recent open letter from over 200 leading economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates, warns of an impending economic transformation driven by artificial intelligence. Organized by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, the letter states that AI could trigger a shift larger than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into a much shorter timeframe. It calls for immediate action to establish institutions that can guide this transformation.

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artificial intelligence may drive an economic transformation “larger than the Industrial Revolution” compressed into a fraction of the time, and that we “must act now” to build the institutions to steer it.

However, the signatories' list reveals a significant geographical imbalance. Four out of five signatories are from the United States and Canada, with the remainder primarily from Europe. Notably, not a single signatory is from China, a country responsible for approximately half of all frontier AI model development and possessing arguably the world's fastest AI adoption rate.

The authors argue that attempting to comprehend this global economic shift while excluding China is akin to studying the Industrial Revolution without considering the nation with the most factories. This omission, they clarify, is not intentional but stems from a deeper, two-level information gap prevalent among Western observers.

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Trying to understand this transformation while excluding China is like studying the Industrial Revolution while ignoring the country with the most factories.

The first level concerns the AI models themselves. Western businesses are already integrating Chinese AI models, such as those from DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, and Moonshot AI, alongside or even in place of their American counterparts. For companies and governments prioritizing cost-effectiveness, open-weight models that run efficiently on local hardware are often the preferred choice. Currently, Chinese models frequently fulfill this need. The recent release of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which rivals leading US models on various benchmarks, is expected to accelerate this trend, a development already reflected in the stock market with a dip in US chip stocks.

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For cost-conscious companies and governments, the sensible choice is often an open-weight model that runs cheaply on local hardware. Today, that choice is a Chinese model.