Overview
- He made the assessment on CNBC’s new podcast The Tech Download, saying Chinese capabilities are closer than many expected a year or two ago.
- Hassabis cited rapid gains from DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen team, Moonshot AI and Zhipu, including strong results achieved with less-advanced chips.
- He said Chinese teams have not yet demonstrated original advances beyond today’s frontier, such as inventing a successor to the transformer.
- U.S. export controls continue to limit access to Nvidia’s top GPUs, with the White House indicating approvals for H200 sales that stop short of the flagship tier.
- Some expect a longer-term divergence as U.S. infrastructure scales faster, and Alibaba’s Lin Junyang put the odds of a Chinese overtake in three to five years below 20%.