Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said that over the past decade, the United States may have been ahead of China in the artificial intelligence race, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.
Wang’s company provides training data to major artificial intelligence players including OpenAI, Google and YuanChina’s leading artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek released an “earth-shattering model” on Christmas Day and followed up with the launch of DeepSeek o1, ​​a powerful inference-focused artificial intelligence model, the World Economic Forum in Davos said on Thursday. The model is similar to OpenAI’s recently released o1 model.
“We found that DeepSeek … performed best, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Wang said.
In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the AI ​​race between the United States and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believed China had more advantages in AI. NVIDIA H100 GPUs—artificial intelligence chips widely used to build leading and powerful artificial intelligence models—are more popular than one might think, especially given U.S. export controls.
Wang also said he believes the AI ​​field will reach trillions of dollars, comparable to estimates for the generative AI market. Up to $1 trillion Income over ten years.
“The United States is going to need a lot of computing power, a lot of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding, “We need to unleash the energy of the United States to achieve the prosperity of artificial intelligence.”
Earlier this week, Trump announced joint venture and Open artificial intelligence, Oracle and Softbank Invest billions of dollars in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. The project “Stargate” was unveiled at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners will include Microsoft, NVIDIA and Oracle, as well as semiconductor companies arm. They said they would invest $100 billion at launch and $500 billion over the next four years.
In an interview on Thursday, Wang said he believed it would take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), a widely cited but vaguely defined benchmark in the field that represents a branch of AI pursuit of technology that Equals or exceeds human intelligence on many tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we’re close to achieving it while others say it’s simply impossible. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful artificial intelligence systems that are able to use computers like you and I do… and basically become remote workers in the most capable way possible.”
Anthropic, an Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, has ramped up technology development over the past year and in October explain Its artificial intelligence agents are able to use computers to complete complex tasks just like humans. The startup says Anthropic’s computer usage capabilities allow its technology to interpret content on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, browse websites and perform tasks from any software and real-time web browsing.
Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC at the time that the tool could “use computers in basically the same way we do.” He said it could complete the task in “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
Open artificial intelligence Reportedly planned A similar feature will be rolled out soon.
When asked which U.S. AI startups are currently leading the AI ​​race, Wang said each model has its own advantages — for example, OpenAI’s model is good at reasoning, while Anthropic’s model is good at coding.
“Competition in this space is getting more intense, not less,” he said.
