The high-stakes competition between the United States and China for Artificial Intelligence supremacy has domestic lawmakers increasingly concerned about the implications for national security, the economy, and American prosperity if the United States loses.
However, as the world’s two largest economies compete for field dominance, by pouring resources into the race, there is also collaboration at work. Indeed, some Artificial Intelligence experts believe that cross-border collaboration is essential for capitalizing on computing advances.
Engineers from Microsoft and China’s ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, are working to advance that concept. Through a project called KubeRay, they’re collaborating on software to help businesses run AI apps more efficiently.
ByteDance software engineer Jiaxin Shan, as well as Microsoft principal software engineer Ali Kanso, explained their progress with Data Scientists, Machine Learning experts, and other developers involved in building large applications utilizing open source software known as Ray at the Ray Summit this week in San Francisco.
Shan and Kanso went over the technical details of KubeRay, pitching the software as useful for powering AI apps that run on various computers, a process known as distributed computing.
Jiaxin and I have been working on an open source project for about a year, which is the beauty of a community gathering like this, said Kanso, a computer science Ph.D. Although we do not work for the same company, we meet and collaborate once a week.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Shan, who earlier worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, is based in the Seattle area, near the headquarters of Microsoft.
Companies frequently collaborate and share engineering resources to contribute to open source projects, which have grown in popularity and spawned a slew of startups in recent years. The Microsoft-ByteDance collaboration is noteworthy in light of the United States and China’s escalating rivalry in AI and intellectual property, as well as concerns about how technological advancements could be utilized for surveillance and privacy invasion.
Microsoft has been investing heavily in AI, as have competitors such as Amazon, Alphabet’s parent company Google, Facebook’s parent company Meta, and Apple. Microsoft, like Google before it, maintains an AI research lab in China to tap into the country’s academic talent.
Meanwhile, as TikTok’s popularity has grown in recent years, ByteDance has become involved in several AI open source projects. ByteDance, for example, debuted its NeurST software tool kit for AI-powered speech translation in 2020. In addition, the company debuted its CloudWeGo open-source enterprise software last year.
Anyscale, a software startup whose technology is based on Ray, organized the Ray Summit. Anyscale, which also contributed to KubeRay, was co-founded in 2019 by a group of engineers that comprised Ion Stoica, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Stoica has a lengthy history in open source software and co-created Databricks, a data analytics company that was estimated at $38 billion in a financing round last year.
Databricks was built on top of Apache Spark, which was created at Berkeley under the direction of Stoica. Anyscale, which is attempting to follow a similar path, announced this week that it has raised an additional $99 million.
Microsoft and Meta frequently use open source projects to spread their own internal technological ideas to the wider community. This attracts potential recruits and positions the companies as technology leaders in the eyes of developers.
There is some history to the Microsoft-ByteDance relationship. Microsoft attempted to purchase TikTok from ByteDance in 2020, at a time when then-President Donald Trump intimidated to ban the social media app for undefined security reasons. A year later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the failed transaction as “the strangest thing” he’d ever worked on.
