The United States and China are competing for artificial intelligence dominance, but experts warn certain factors could leave the US falling behind in the race.
Old-fashioned shortages are among the top threats to America building out AI at scale -- including electricity, computing power, chips, data and engineering talent, according to a report by Axios.
"It takes an insane amount of data, then awesome programming intelligence — human technologists — to create human-like AI. But that's just table stakes," Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote for Axios. "It then takes an insane amount of compute power to will their data and work into existence — then a mind-blowing amount of actual energy to make it all happen. We're short on all of it."
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, recently said during an interview that energy constraints are the number one bottleneck to AI progress. He explained that the equivalent output of one nuclear power plant, a gigawatt, can be needed to train a single AI model.
"I don't think anyone's built a gigawatt single training cluster yet," he told the Dwarkesh Podcast. "And if you're talking about building large new power plants or large buildouts, and then building transmission lines that cross other private or public land, that is just a heavily regulated thing. So you're talking about many years of lead time. So if we wanted to stand up just some massive facility to power that, I think that that is, that's a very long-term project."
Chris Lehane, vice president of public works at ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told Axios that "infrastructure is destiny" when it comes to the US maintaining its edge over China.
"You can't democratize AI unless you're fully building out this infrastructure stack," he said. "Our focus is building in the U.S. as a key to democratizing access in the US, and allowing the US to continue to lead in developing the tech."
Another growing shortage to combat is a lack of qualified engineering talent because of the years of training it requires -- with Axios noting that today's top talent started training decades ago.
As for why the US and China care so much about AI dominance, "first and foremost is military power," Doug Calidas, Harvard Belfer Center Fellow and former Chief of Staff to Senator Amy Klobuchar, told Fox Business.
"Both nations want it, and both nations are terrified of the other one having it before they do," Calidas told Fox. "There's a fear that if you fall behind now, you could fall behind for the long run."
Calidas pointed to "drone swarming" as just one example of how AI is expected to transform the next generation of warfare.
"A few drones are easy to defend against, he said, but if a military has thousands of them and they are all moving in formation in real-time based on an AI feedback system, that is difficult to defend against," Fox Business reported.