U.S-China AI talent race heats up

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When it comes to brain power, “America’s edge is deteriorating dangerously,” Miller told a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee last week. It’s a lead that’s “fragile and much smaller” than its advantage in AI chips, he said.

Carnegie Endowment researchers echoed those concerns a day later, noting China has been producing more top-tier AI researchers over the last few years, while fewer are heading to the U.S.

Part of the difference comes from sheer scale, especially as education levels rise in China.

Its population is quadruple that of the U.S., and the same goes for the volume of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates. In 2020, China produced 3.57 million STEM graduates, the most of any country, and far outpacing the 820,000 in the U.S.

The growth of China’s higher education graduates has been dramatic, increasing ninefold in just one generation. The share of adults with at least a master’s degree rose from just 0.1% at the turn of the century to nearly 0.9% two decades later.

The U.S., starting from a much higher base, has seen the same ratio climb far more steadily from 8.7% to 14.1% during that time.

The surge is reshaping companies’ pipelines. Most of Xpeng’s new hires are fresh graduates, CEO He Xiaopeng told reporters last month.

He claimed that despite a relatively small pool of AI talent in both the U.S. and China, the electric vehicle manufacturer was able to recruit 10 specialists in driver-assist technology this year.

The company’s former vice president of autonomous driving now heads Nvidia’s automotive department.

Beijing is engineering more of this momentum as it seeks tech self-sufficiency. The Ministry of Education said in August that one-fifth of higher education programs nationwide have been revamped in the last two years — with a slew of majors cut or added — to channel more students into AI and integrated circuits fields.

It’s not necessarily that China is much better at attracting global AI talent, but the ability to keep more AI experts at home “could have a major impact on talent flows,” Tufts University’s Miller pointed out to me in an email.

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration rules could make it difficult for AI researchers to work in the U.S., he said.