Kai-Fu Lee on China’s Race to the Future

Silicon Valley may be the center of the tech world right now, but Kai-Fu Lee says that’s going to change, and fast. Lee—a computer scientist who worked at Apple, Microsoft, and Google before becoming a venture capitalist—predicts that China will soon overtake the United States as the world leader in innovation. Lee points to the company WeChat as an example; it’s a one-stop shop for all the many things that people use apps for: texting, ride hailing, ordering food or movie tickets, and even paying for those services. WeChat “has essentially eliminated credit cards . . . which have become a dinosaur in China,” Lee tells the New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar. The enormous customer bases for Chinese services mean that the tech sector has more data to use for machine learning, and therefore its algorithms become “smarter” faster. The U.S., Kolhatkar thinks, does have legitimate complaints about Chinese economic policy, but the Administration’s use of tariffs as a lever is backward-looking. If China’s development of artificial intelligence surpasses ours, Chinese entrepreneurs will beat out Silicon Valley and hold the key to the future.