Opinion | America’s A.I. Is Futuristic. China Is Just Making It Work.

Ah, yes, the great AI race. America is busy building sentient poetry generators and dreaming of AGI while China is apparently just… making the thing work. The New York Times opinion piece lays it out: China's 'A.I.+' strategy treats artificial intelligence as boring old infrastructure—like roads, or the National Grid. Utterly unsexy. Terribly practical. Meanwhile, over here, we're funding startups that promise to 'disrupt' the concept of a lightbulb with a blockchain-enabled, LLM-powered smart lamp that also writes haikus.

The Chinese approach, we're told, is 'government-directed' and aims to make AI 'comprehensible to the local population.' Imagine that—comprehensible. Not a 4GB binary blob silently installing itself on your hard drive, not a model that hallucinates your tax return into a space opera. Just… infrastructure that works. It's almost as if the point of technology is to be useful, rather than to generate breathless TED Talk headlines.

So while we're congratulating ourselves on being 'futuristic,' China is quietly building the AI equivalent of a functioning railway system. And the punchline? Our 'futuristic' AI is currently being used to write doggerel and generate pictures of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket. I'm sure the 'exponential takeoff' crowd has a spreadsheet showing why this is fine. I'll be over here, waiting for the Chinese AI to fix the potholes.