The U.S. may have led China in the artificial intelligence race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed.
Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta, said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an “earth-shattering model” on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek o1, which competes with OpenAI’s recently-released o1 model.
“What we’ve found is that DeepSeek … is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Wang said.
In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the AI race between the U.S. and China as an “AI war,” adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs — AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models — than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls.
Wang also said he believes the AI sector will reach a trillion dollars, on par with estimates that the generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
“The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure,” Wang said, later adding, “We need to unleash U.S. 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 U.S. AI infrastructure. The project, Stargate, 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 include Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.
In the interview Thursday, Wang said he believes that it’ll take two to four years to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a widely-cited but vaguely-defined benchmark used in the AI sector to denote a branch of AI pursuing technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks. AGI is a hotly debated topic, with some leaders saying we’re close to attaining it and some 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 I could… and basically be a remote worker in the most capable way.”
Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, ramped up its technology development throughout the past year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.
When asked which U.S. AI startups are leading the AI race right now, Wang said that models each have their own strengths — for instance, OpenAI’s models are great at reasoning, while Anthropic’s are great at coding.
“The space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive,” he said.