A Chinese lab recently unveiled another astonishingly powerful and astonishingly cheap artificial intelligence model. GLM-5.2, produced by Z.ai, is almost as good as Anthropic’s latest model but runs at less than a tenth of its price.
The A.I. race between the U.S. and China has been front of mind at the highest levels of government in both countries.
But creating the most potent model is not the only — and maybe not even the best — way to measure A.I. success. Today I write about an area that’s had less attention, but where China might well have an edge: managing the human and political fallout from the A.I. revolution.
Robotaxis and A.I. Marxism
If there is one thing China’s Communist Party fears, it’s a restive proletariat.
In Wuhan, the world’s largest open-air laboratory for driverless cars, taxi drivers first complained about the growing fleet of robotaxis two years ago. Petitions were filed. Social media posts were hashtagged. The local outcry was noisy.
It focused minds in the party, which reacted swiftly to censor the protests online. But it also set off a bigger rethink of something that worries many in the West, too. How to avoid mass displacement of humans by A.I. in the labor market — and the political backlash that comes with it?
