China thinks big on brain-computer interfaces after world-first surgery

Bill Gates is likely to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year as the Microsoft co-founder seeks to rally support for global cooperation on artificial intelligence (AI) risks.A meeting may take place in November, Reuters reported on Wednesday citing a Gates spokesman. Xi last met his “old friend” in 2023, when Gates became the first foreign business leader to visit the Chinese president following the Covid-19 pandemic.Gates also published a 6,000-word essay on Wednesday that called for US-China cooperation on AI challenges and the formation of a new international body to help oversee the technology. He identified three “big risks” from AI – lost jobs, crime and terrorism, and impacts on children’s development and human relationships.“The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” Gates wrote. “Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition.”China had “gone the furthest” in implementing safeguards for children, Gates said, citing recent restrictions on the use of AI companions. The average American was also probably underestimating the impact of robotics on blue-collar jobs because “much of the advanced work” is being done in China, he said.Related news: Plans for a US-China dialogue on AI have made little progress, the South China Morning Post reported last week, citing people familiar with the situation. The US side is yet to decide who will take the lead in discussions because AI cuts across so many areas of government, the report said. The two countries have also yet to decide on whether to include technical experts and private companies in the talks, among other matters. Xi and US President Donald Trump agreed to set up a dialogue at a summit in Beijing in May. DeepSeek has started work on an initial public offering, with the aim of listing on Shanghai’s tech-focused Star Market next year, the SCMP said on Wednesday. A sale application may be filed before the end of 2026, the report said, citing two unidentified people. The tech start-up is also close to completing a 50 billion yuan (US$7.4 billion) funding round which values the company at about 500 billion yuan. Elsewhere, two Hangzhou-based companies are set to join a wave of robotics IPOs in Hong Kong. Cognitive systems developer Infiforce Technology Group and embodied AI firm UDeer.ai both plan to sell shares in the city as early as next year. Chip giant Nvidia reported its first shipment of H200 AI chips to China following a months-long wait to take advantage of looser US export controls. Chinese regulators had reportedly been reluctant to let companies buy H200s, which are the second-best Nvidia chips on the market. Chinese AI firm MiniMax boosted first-half revenue by 283 per cent, powered by a 700 per cent jump in enterprise sales. China’s three leading chip-packaging companies – Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology (JCET), Tongfu Microelectronics and Huatian Technology – have announced a combined 15 billion yuan-plus of expansion plans amid the AI boom. Global inventories of multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), used in circuit boards as electrical buffers, have dropped to record lows due to AI demand. How others reported it Shifting debate: Overall, Gates’ planned outreach to Xi signals that the debate over AI is moving from innovation versus regulation towards international security and geopolitical coordination. Whether the United States and China can cooperate on AI risks while competing for technological dominance may become one of the defining governance challenges of the coming decade. (Modern Diplomacy) US-China competition: The two powers are now competing on different axes. Washington built its technology wall around technologies whose scarcity conferred power; China is responding by trying to make increasingly capable AI abundant. And abundance is its own kind of leverage. It is harder to sanction and even harder to reverse. America’s technology wall has not fallen but China’s AI strategy is spreading faster than the wall can expand. (CNA, Opinion) Backlash risk: “We are blessed with a lot of technological advancements recently, but the main imperative for decision-makers around the world is really: how do you make sure this counts in the real economy?” [Mirek Dusek, the World Economic Forum’s] managing director,] said. There is a “risk of a backlash against some of these technologies”, he warned. (Agence France-Presse) Global South: Developing countries have not explicitly endorsed Beijing’s diplomatic push on AI nor have they backed the new institutional architecture proposed by Beijing, even as they selectively use Chinese AI products or participate in informal seminars and forums on AI capacity-building. The impact of China’s and Russia’s cyber diplomacy over the past decade suggests that wholesale, normative alignment with their state-controlled vision is unlikely. (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) Different futures: “There is a risk that AI will exacerbate global inequality, with developed countries gaining more while developing countries fall further behind. Yet, at the same time, AI has the potential to dramatically reduce global inequality because it can be more readily available than traditional infrastructure,” [Robert Lawrence Kuhn, chairman of The Kuhn Foundation] said. In Kuhn’s view, China is playing a significant role through major initiatives because its AI and large language models are high-quality, open-source, relatively affordable and targeted at specific applications. (China Daily) The SCMP Plus takeawayBill Gates offers a somewhat different take on China to other tech leaders as he adds to a growing pile of artificial intelligence (AI) manifestos.The Microsoft founder sees the country playing a significant role in tackling AI risks, saying that “some cooperation between the US and China will be required”. That’s a marked contrast to manifestos from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei or tech investor Marc Andreessen, which portray China – or authoritarianism more generally – as one of the key risks that needs to be contained.Gates avoids presenting AI as a US-China race, and doesn’t talk about US controls on chip exports – something that Zuckerberg and Amodei both advocated. Instead, his somewhat downbeat essay argues that all countries need to start addressing AI risks, such as lost jobs and security threats.The manifesto calls for new domestic and international frameworks, backed up by new institutions, to help manage challenges from AI. At the domestic level, new AI agencies will set priorities that cut across different government departments, ensuring that someone is clearly in charge of addressing risks affecting widespread areas of the economy.At the global level, Gates wants a new body “unlike any other institution we have ever created”. This will combine inspection powers, regulations, international agreements and more, he says.“Even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders,” he says. “This is why an international organisation will need to be built.”Gates may get a favourable hearing for this idea in Beijing. Just last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of the need to “improve global governance” of AI and form “a consensus-based global governance framework”, as he made his first-ever keynote speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai.Xi also highlighted the “important role of the United Nations”, which may have drawn a few sniggers in the White House.His argument fits into a wider Chinese push to replace the US-led international order with a more multilateral and multipolar world. This also encompasses China’s currency, the yuan, chipping away at the dominance of the dollar, the creation of non-Western multilateral groupings and the construction of infrastructure overseas to reshape global trade patterns.US President Donald Trump agreed to set up an AI dialogue with China during a May summit in Beijing. Little progress has been made since, with the two sides failing to agree on basic matters, such as whether to include technical experts in discussions, the SCMP reported last week.Gates gives little concrete advice on establishing a global AI organisation, beyond the need for speed and international cooperation. He has suggested elsewhere that the US take the lead in setting global AI standards. Demis Hassabis, the Google DeepMind chairman and Nobel laureate, also took that position in an AI manifesto published last month.Anthropic’s Amodei has strongly backed US regulation of frontier AI, including blocks on models that don’t meet high safety standards. He applauded Trump’s executive order boosting the government’s role in AI while also pressing for further action. Trump’s watered-down order only required voluntary testing.Zuckerberg was much more cautious on regulation, arguing that stringent oversight could slow progress and hinder the US in the global AI race. His key safety argument instead focused on open-weight models versus closed proprietary systems.The Facebook founder contended that open-weight models, which users can download and tweak, are inherently safer because AI power is spread across a wider user base. Closed systems, by contrast, remain under the control of the developer, effectively concentrating AI power in a few hands.This is a position that would gain favour in China. In his AI speech last month, Xi underscored the country’s commitment to “encouraging open source, openness, collaboration and sharing”.Pursuing open-weight models fits into China’s push for a multipolar world, as it challenges the dominance of US tech giants. It’s also a model that has helped Chinese developers win global AI market share with lower-cost systems even as the US seeks to slow China’s advance by limiting access to chips.That competition suggests a tough road ahead for Gates’ hopes of seeing cooperation between the two tech superpowers on global AI regulation.