The West is debating AI’s future with half the world absent

An open letter organized by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab warns that artificial intelligence may drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, but four in five signatories come from the United States and Canada, with none from China, which is home to roughly half of all frontier model development and has the world's fastest AI adoption. The omission reflects a two-level information gap that undermines the debate's global relevance.

The West is debating AI’s future with half the world absent Any meaningful debate must include China, where the AI experiment is also running, at greater speed and scale and with different results open letter https://www.wemustactnow.ai/ organised by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Its warning was stark: 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. We agree with every word. Then we scanned the signatory list. Four in five signatories come from the United States and Canada, and the rest almost entirely from Europe. Not one name comes from China. The letter writes about a global economic transformation, but its signatory list suggests half the AI world does not exist. China is home to roughly half of all frontier model development and has arguably the world’s fastest AI adoption. Trying to understand this transformation while excluding China is like studying the Industrial Revolution while ignoring the country with the most factories. No one intended the omission. It reflects a two-level information gap that runs deeper than most Western observers realise. instead of https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3355927/more-us-firms-turn-chinas-deepseek-over-pricey-silicon-valley-ai?module=inline&pgtype=article , their American counterparts. Kimi K3 https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3360885/moonshot-ai-unveils-worlds-largest-open-source-ai-model-china-narrows-gap-us-rivals?module=inline&pgtype=article , which matches leading US models on many benchmarks, that trend will only accelerate. Investors grasped this immediately: US chip stocks fell on the news.