Chinese tech firms make rapid progress: OpenAI CEO

Chinese tech companies are making rapid progress across various sectors, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview with CNBC.

Altman noted that in some areas, Chinese firms are near the global frontier, while in others they still lag behind.

The country is actively expanding its domestic chip industry, aiming to compete with companies like Nvidia.

Altman’s comments come amid broader international competition to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).

He also mentioned that OpenAI is exploring ads within ChatGPT, initially in the US, as a potential revenue source.

The company is currently focused on growth and expects to pursue profitability once it achieves sustainable unit economics.

OpenAI is reportedly close to completing a US$100 billion funding round, with plans to test ad formats that resemble Instagram-style ads.

Altman emphasized that the company’s growth remains a priority at this stage.

🔗 Source: CNBC

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Sam Altman said China is advancing “across the entire stack,” spanning chip design, chipmaking, and the AI software developers rely on. That pace lines up with a state-led industrial policy aimed at a more self-reliant AI ecosystem 1.
On chips, Beijing supports domestic players such as Huawei. ByteDance uses Huawei’s Ascend AI chips for model training, though Ascend still trails Nvidia on performance and production volume 1.
Funding runs deep. The National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the “Big Fund”) has received about $95 billion across three rounds, according to one estimate 2. Work also covers software alternatives, including efforts by Denglin Technology and Moore Threads to replace Nvidia’s CUDA software, plus domestic AI frameworks such as Huawei’s MindSpore and Baidu’s PaddlePaddle as alternatives to Meta’s PyTorch and Google’s TensorFlow. China also invests in talent, with world-class AI research centers and a 2024 ranking of second by share of highly cited AI researchers 1.

U.S.-led export controls have added momentum to China’s push for tech independence, alongside competition to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) 1.
Beijing’s “Delete America” (“Delete A”) initiative ties to SASAC guidance (from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees state-owned enterprises) and seeks to replace foreign software in IT systems by 2027 2.
China is also pressing companies to “use domestic” chips, including moves to steer demand away from Nvidia’s H20 3. That pressure pushes engineering teams to tune models for local hardware, which supports a parallel stack meant to reduce reliance on U.S. tools such as Nvidia’s CUDA software 3. A longer-term risk is a global tech split into less compatible spheres that slows shared progress and efficiency 4.