The United States may have led China in the AI race over the past decade, according to Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.
Wang, whose company provides training data to major AI players including OpenAI, Google and deadDeepSeek, China's leading AI lab, released a “seismic model” on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek o1, which competes with the recently released o1 model, he said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. From OpenAI.
“What we found is that DeepSeek…is the best performer, or roughly on par with the best US models,” Wang said.
In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the AI race between the US and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has significantly more AI. Nvidia H100 GPUs – AI chips that are widely used to build ground-breaking powerful AI models – are slower than people might think, especially given US export controls.
Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach $1 trillion, on par with estimates that the generative AI market is poised to grow. Top $1 trillion in revenue over a decade.
“The United States will need a huge amount of computational power, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding: “We need to unleash American energy to enable this AI boom.”
Earlier this week, Trump announced A Joint venture with OpenAI, oracle and Softbank To invest billions of dollars in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States. The Stargate project was unveiled at the White House by Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Key initial technology partners will be included Microsoft, Nvidia And Oracle, as well as the semiconductor company arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.
In his interview Thursday, Wang said he believes it will take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a widely cited but vaguely defined standard used in the AI sector to refer to a branch of… Artificial intelligence seeks technology that equals or exceeds human intelligence in a wide range of tasks. Artificial general intelligence is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we're close to achieving it, and others saying it's not possible at all. Wang said his own definition of AGI is “powerful AI systems that are able to use a computer just like you or me…and are essentially teleoperating in the most capable way possible.”
Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI executives, has ramped up its technology development throughout the past year, and in October, the startup He said That its AI agents were able to use computers like humans to complete complex tasks. The startup said Anthropic's ability to use a computer allows its technology to interpret what is on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate through websites, perform tasks through any program and browse the Internet in real time.
The tool could “use computers in the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said he could do tasks in “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI It is said that plans To introduce a similar feature soon.
When asked which US AI startups are leading the AI race right now, Wang said each model has its own strengths — for example, OpenAI models are great at thinking, while Anthropic models are great at programming.
“Space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he added.
