FYI, below is an excerpt from an interesting article in today's The NYT:
"In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research
Although some Silicon Valley executives paint China as the enemy, Chinese brains continue to play a major role in U.S. research.
By Cade Metz and Eli Tan
Reporting from San Francisco
When Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, unveiled the company’s Superintelligence Lab in June, he named 11 artificial intelligence researchers who were joining his ambitious effort to build a machine more powerful than the human brain.
All 11 were immigrants educated in other countries. Seven were born in China, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times.
Although many American executives, government officials and pundits have spent months painting China as the enemy of America’s rapid push into A.I., much of the groundbreaking research emerging from the United States is driven by Chinese talent.
Two new studies show that researchers born and educated in China have for years played major roles inside leading U.S. artificial intelligence labs. They also continue to drive important A.I. research in industry and academia, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and growing anti-China sentiment in Silicon Valley.
The research, from two organizations, provides a detailed look at how much the American tech industry continues to rely on engineers from China, particularly in A.I. The findings also offer a more nuanced understanding of how researchers in the two countries continue to collaborate, despite increasingly heated language from Washington and Beijing.
In 2020, a study from the Paulson Institute, which promotes constructive ties between the United States and China, estimated that Chinese A.I. researchers accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s top A.I. talent. Most of those Chinese researchers worked for American companies and universities.
A new study from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that a vast majority of these Chinese researchers have continued to work for U.S. institutions. Of the 100 top-tier Chinese researchers in the original study who were at U.S. universities or companies in 2019 — three years before the arrival of ChatGPT set off the global A.I. boom — 87 are still doing research at U.S. universities or companies.
“The U.S. A.I. industry is the biggest beneficiary of Chinese talent,” said Matt Sheehan, an analyst who helped write both studies. “It gets so many top-tier researchers from China who come to work in the U.S., study in the U.S. and, as this study shows, stay in the U.S., despite all the tensions and obstacles that have been thrown at them in recent years.”
There is still significant collaboration between the two nations. A separate study from alphaXiv, a company that helps people track and use the latest A.I. research, shows that since 2018, joint research between America and China happens more often than collaboration between any other two nations."
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