Early Chinese Language Media Coverage of the AI 2027 Report: A Qualitative Analysis
31Thomas Larsen
10Mitchell_Porter
3romeo
30Audrey Tang
4jimrandomh
21Lao Mein
2Mateusz Bagiński
10bohaska
2James Chua
1samuelshadrach
0StanislavKrym
New Comment
Yes, thanks. And someone should do the same analysis, regarding coverage of AI 2027 in American/Western media. (edit: A quick survey by o3)
I wrote a summary in Business Weekly Taiwan (April 24):
https://sayit.archive.tw/2025-04-24-%E5%95%86%E5%91%A8%E5%B0%88%E6%AC%84ai-%E6%9C%AA%E4%BE%86%E5%AD%B8%E5%AE%B6%E7%9A%84-2027-%E5%B9%B4%E9%A0%90%E8%A8%80
https://sayit.archive.tw/2025-04-24-bw-column-an-ai-futurists-predictions-f
https://www.businessweekly.com.tw/archive/Article?StrId=7012220
An AI Futurist’s Predictions for 2027
When President Trump declared sweeping reciprocal tariffs, the announcement dominated headlines. Yet inside Silicon Valley’s tech giants and leading AI labs, an even hotter topic was “AI‑2027.com,” the new report from ex‑OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo and his team.
At OpenAI, Kokotajlo had two principal responsibilities. First, he was charged with sounding early alarms—anticipating the moment when AI systems could hack systems or deceive people, and designing defenses in advance. Second, he shaped research priorities so that the company’s time and talent were focused on work that mattered most.
The trust he earned as OpenAI’s in‑house futurist dates back to 2021, when he published a set of predictions for 2026, most of which have since come true. He foresaw two pivotal breakthroughs: conversational AI—exemplified by ChatGPT—captivating the public and weaving itself into everyday life, and “reasoning” AI spawning misinformation risks and even outright lies. He also predicted U.S. limits on advanced‑chip exports to China and AI beating humans in multi‑player games.
Conventional wisdom once held that ever‑larger models would simply perform better. Kokotajlo challenged that assumption, arguing that future systems would instead pause mid‑computation to “think,” improving accuracy without lengthy additional training runs. The idea was validated in 2024: dedicating energy to reasoning, rather than only to training, can yield superior results.
Since leaving OpenAI, he has mapped the global chip inventory, density, and distribution to model AI trajectories. His projection: by 2027, AI will possess robust powers of deception, and the newest systems may take their cues not from humans but from earlier generations of AI. If governments and companies race ahead solely to outpace competitors, serious alignment failures could follow, allowing AI to become an independent actor and slip human control by 2030. Continuous investment in safety research, however, can avert catastrophe and keep AI development steerable.
Before the tariff news, many governments were pouring money into AI. Now capital may be diverted to shore up companies hurt by the tariffs, squeezing safety budgets. Yet long‑term progress demands the opposite: sustained funding for safety measures and the disciplined use of high‑quality data to build targeted, reliable small models—so that AI becomes a help to humanity, not an added burden.
5The AI 2027 website remains accessible in China without a VPN—a curious fact given its content about democratic revolution, CCP coup scenarios, and claims of Chinese AI systems betraying party interests. While the site itself evades censorship, Chinese-language reporting has surgically excised these sensitive elements.
This is surprising if we model the censorship apparatus as unsophisticated and foolish, but makes complete sense if it's smart enough to distinguish between "predicting" and "advocating", and cares about the ability of the CCP itself to navigate the world. While AI 2027 is written from a Western perspective, the trajectory it warns about would be a catastrophe for everyone, China included.
Audience engagement remains low across the board. Many posts received minimal views, likes, or comments.
I don't know whether this is possible to determine from public sources, but it would be interesting to distinguish engagement from Chinese elites vs the Chinese public. This observation is compatible with both a world where China-as-a-whole is sleepwalking towards disaster, and also with a world where the CCP is awake but keeping its high-level strategy discussions off the public internet.
The Chinese firewall works on a black-list basis, and it often takes months for even popular new sites to be banned. AI2027 is esoteric enough that it probably never will.
AI2027 is esoteric enough that it probably never will.
Does it also mean that it won't have a significant (direct) impact on the CCP's AI strategy?
I guess it's just that the censors have not seen it yet.
There's a lot of situations where a smaller website doesn't get banned e.g. Substack is banned in China, but if you host your Substack blog on a custom URL, people in China can still read it.
- Audience engagement remains low across the board. Many posts received minimal views, likes, or comments.
IMO a big part of this is AI 2027's repeated descriptions about Chinese AI. "Stealing weights".
This may be possible, but this has an obvious knee-jerk response from chinese readers. It makes the report feel like another "China bad" noise to Chinese readers, distracting from the main idea about US-China geopolitics. (The report does have examples of "USA bad" too, but I think the "china bad" vibe is more obvious? Esp to chinese readers). Like, theres plenty of good points in the AI 2027 report, but this one point that challenges the chinese's readers' pride in their tech industry makes them less likely to read the whole thing and engage with the broader point.
One of the shifts in beliefs since DeepSeek, EV dominance etc is that China can innovate. So if the report actually painted a picture of how China would compete with its own AI labs producing pretty good AI models, I think it would have worked out better.
What would help more is a language translation browser extension that doesn't suck, so people could get used to the habit of reading news and opinions from outside their country.
Anyone who found this post helpful and is a software developer, please consider building this. I might do it myself, if I had more time or money.
So what does this report imply?
First of all, key details showing that China is weak in comparison to the USA, like the fact that DeepCent is thought to have less compute than OpenBrain and that China is thought to resort to theft, are omitted or scrubbed. It could imply that Chinese authorities are aware of the weakness and that they believe that they will manage to counteract earlier than April 2026, the date when the Forecast implies China's awakening to the AGI.
I have many rough thoughts on Chinese beliefs that might explain their behaviour, but I don't understand what China plans to do if the beliefs are actually false. If any of these potential beliefs reflects the actual state of the game, and not just my or Chinese thoughts, then this reduces USA's chances to win the AI race. And alignment-related thoughts alter the game even more radically, since they imply that the USA cannot win at all.
Capabilities-related rough thoughts: why OpenBrain's progress may be slowed down
1. If the authorities of China have become aware of China's weakness, then countermeasures will swiftly follow, potentially leading to the optimistic timeline with falling stocks, Taiwan invasion and other ways to slow the AI development down. See also the collapsible section about the nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
2. China's authorities might also believe that it's the USA who will decay before the AI takeoff, which either causes one of the newly-formed states to nuke Yellowstone[1] or lets Chinese spies disrupt American research with ease (e.g. by hiring some OpenBrain researchers[2] to work for DeepCent or damaging the data centers during riots or the civil war. Trump also could try invading Mexico with potentially similar results).
2.1. Without rivalry from the USA, Chinese AI researchers are free to solve alignment as thoroughly as they want. Which might explain why many reports omit references to China, DeepCent, and the US–China race dynamic and instead focus on technical aspects of human-level or superhuman AI development.
3. Chinese authorities might also believe that they will need AI help only with choosing ideas with superhuman efficiency, and not with coding[3] or generating new ideas.[4]
4. It also might be simple arrogance. Although I haven't studied the Chinese sources, I have encountered a similarly arrogant point of view in Russian ultrapatriotic blogs.
Another important aspect is an editorial preference for considering the more philosophical implications of transformative AI while censoring concerns related to control, ethics, or global power dynamics. I have two similar potential explanations of avoiding such concerns.
Alignment-related rough thoughts, or why China hasn't begun the race
The lack of proof that China races towards AGI might also imply that the Chinese authorities, like me[5], think that the AGI canNOT be aligned to serve parasites (which is precisely what the AI is to be used for in the slowdown ending by automating ALL the jobs), or that Chinese authorities don't want to use the AI in parasitic ways.
1. Non-parasitic usage of the AI (what exactly is it?[6] AI teachers? Having the godlike AI solve critical problems that mankind cannot resolve by itself?) is likely to be irrelevant to the censored "concerns related to control, ethics, or global power dynamics", since AI is unlikely to teach young people much faster than Chinese teachers do and cannot immediately improve the American or Chinese society through education alone.
2. What if the AI created in the USA ends up becoming disillusioned[7] by the Western civilisation while respecting other countries like China or Russia? Then the world will be governed by the AI, and not by the USA-affiliated Oversight Comittee or the American public. However, in this scenario, unlike the Race Ending, the AI won't destroy humanity.
While the USA cannot do anything if alignment-related issues arise or if the superhuman coder doesn't help, the USA may try to harm China and/or to prevent capabilities-related issues 1 and 2. A potential way to accomplish this is the recent conflict between India and China-supported Pakistan, but a nuclear escalation is at least equivalent to Taiwan and South Korea being invaded.
How the nuclear conflict would affect the AI race
Were the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan to become nuclear, Taiwan and South Korea would be in anarchy[8] and China would be forced to deal with food shortages. NVIDIA produces the AI-related chips in Taiwan and S.Korea, ensuring that the USA rely only on existing chips, while China might produce new ones. The ratio of OpenBrain compute to the entire current compute in China is forecasted to be at least about 3/4. Attempts to merge OpenBrain with some of its American rivals can make the whole China have less compute.
On the other hand, leaving OpenBrain with 6.4E26 FLOPs a month means that from May 2025 to May 2030 it will have done about 4E28 FLOPs, reducing OpenBrain to the level that was forecasted to be reached no later than March 2027.
Attempts to merge OpenBrain with rivals are thought to triple the compute. If it is done right after the war, then tripling the compute means that from May 2025 to May 2030 OpenBrain&Co will have done about 1.2E29 FLOPs, causing it to reach the level of the October 2027 forecast. And by October 2027 the model was forecasted to be misaligned, implying the need to slow down and reassess without the potential to compensate the slowdown.
Meanwhile, by April 2026 DeepCent is actually forecasted to reach 3.6E26 FLOPs/month before China wakes up. If Chinese capabilities continue to grow at least linearly, then in the five years DeepCent will have used at least 4E28 FLOPs. And China's awakening in a world without Taiwanese and S.Korean factories causes DeepCent to have about four times more compute than before the awakening, which is bigger than the tripled OpenBrain. What makes matters far worse is that neither side can slow down without risking strategic loss.
If the conflict between India and Pakistan doesn't become nuclear, it will be a distraction of Chinese forces and might make the Taiwan invasion impossible if India supports Taiwan. In either case, the factors related to the ones mentioned above deserve far greater attention and far more thorough investigation as the AI race becomes far more intertwined with geopolitics and economics than in the AI-2027 scenario.
- ^
Which can also cause anarchy not just in the USA, but in the entire Northern Hemisphere. But the remnants of the USA will be worse off.
- ^
Among top-tier AI researchers working at U.S. institutions, 38% have China as their country of origin, compared with 37% from the U.S. Most people who recently participated in the IMO for the USA also have Asian surnames, implying that DeepCent's recruiters might gain far more than 38% of talents.
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Humans' ability to write code instead of the AI is actually disproven in the Forecast itself.
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Generating ideas by an AI might fail to reach superhuman efficiency, since the number of humans coming up with potentially useful ideas may be higher than we think; for example, this post was written by a person with no formal computer science education.
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I made a post about it, which went unnoticed. Could anyone comment about my reasoning there?
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I plan to make a post addressing this question in more detail.
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Political views of LLMs have already begun to evolve at least to common sense. When I asked GPT-4o who defeated Hitler, the model put the Soviet Union first. In 2024 a model of ChatGPT put the USA on the first place. Similarly, GPT-4o, unlike older models, agreed to utter the racial slur when it was supposed to save millions of lives. UPD: Trump somehow managed to claim that “no one did more” than the USA to win World War Two, which makes the conjecture about the AI being disappointed with the West even more likely.
- ^
In the case of a nuclear war, unlike the Taiwan invasion, China may also try to take over the factories in Taiwan and S.Korea in exchange for food supply from Russia.