Tesla CEO Elon Musk called for cooperation with like-minded Chinese partners in clean energy, artificial intelligence, human-machine interface, and space to jointly create a shared future. Musk is the latest U.S. entrepreneur with a warm attitude toward Chinese partners in cutting-edge technologies, which will benefit the world, experts said. Musk said Tesla was established to solve the problems of the energy revolution, and Chinese enterprises cannot be neglected in the transition. The executive made the comments in an article for a magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the nation’s top internet regulator. The article was published online in Chinese.
Dong Yifan, Assistant Research Fellow at the Beijing-based China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said: “Musk’s comments highlight that the opportunities of the Chinese market and the appeal of Chinese partners are unparalleled for large global companies. That is especially true amid the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s efforts to promote industrial transformation and upgrade will continue to create tons of opportunities for foreign companies. Healthy China-U.S. technological ties will benefit the world.”
On August 12, the millionth China-made Tesla EV rolled off the assembly line at Tesla's Shanghai plant, which means the facility has produced around one-third of all vehicles the U.S. carmaker has sold across the world. The carmaker said the Shanghai facility is “the most efficient” unit of its global production network. Musk’s nod to Chinese partners in AI also reflects the benefits that would ensue if China-U.S. cooperation deepens in the strategically important technology sector, experts said. A report from Stanford University showed that China and the U.S. team up to an astonishing degree on research in AI, despite geopolitical uncertainties. It has quintupled since 2010 and totaled 9,660 papers in 2021, with researchers on both sides seeing benefits in sharing expertise and working together, the report stated. “What’s clear is that the amount of collaboration between the U.S. and China in AI has gone up dramatically, and it has gone up much more than any collaboration between two other countries,” said Raymond Perrault, AI Researcher at SRI International. China is emerging as a pioneer in AI. The nation filed more than half of all the world’s AI patent applications last year, and Chinese researchers produced about one-third of AI journal papers and AI citations in 2021, the China Daily reports.
