Silicon Valley’s Other China Problem: It’s Training Their AI

When U.S. sales teams from Silicon Valley’s big data-labeling startups visited this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul, Korea, they arrived prepped to court the industry’s big spenders. The data companies—collectively worth tens of billions of dollars and generating billions in annual revenue supplying training data to customers like OpenAI and Anthropic—are used to chasing AI labs that are notoriously demanding, fickle and difficult to satisfy. They found another eager customer waiting for them: China’s AI industry. Some Chinese companies have shopping lists. Tencent—which has previously been designated by the U.S. government as associated with the Chinese military, a characterization the company disputes— circulated with prospective vendors a detailed request for training data spanning finance, cybersecurity and one of AI’s most coveted research goals: AI systems capable of improving themselves. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices