Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Tech.
I'm Tom Standage, Deputy Editor at The Economist.
And with me as usual is my co-host Alex Hern, our AI correspondent.
Hi Alex.
Hi Tom.
Today we're talking about the geopolitics of AI
and the different strategies that governments are taking towards developing and adopting the technology.
And we'll be asking, does every country need its own AI?
So Alex, I suppose the elephant in the room here
when you talk about the geopolitics of AI is you think about it very often as a race between America and China.
So let's start with that.
What's the state of play roughly?
I think the state of play is American labs are still competing for number one.
I think right now it's probably Anthropic
that's in the lead in some way but that's because Anthropic brought out its newest top-tier model most recently.
Effectively we have three big players jockeying for number one position
and whoever's the most recent to hit publish is at the top. Great.
The Chinese labs are competing to shorten the headway that America has.
So every four months or so, they move a month closer. Right?
And currently we have models like Kimi K2 thinking, we have Alibaba's Qwen VL 3 or 3-VL.