Beating the U.S. but keeping control of tech [Video]

China’s race to develop smarter-than-human artificial intelligence may put it ahead of the U.S., but such ground-breaking technology could also risk lessening the stronghold that the ruling Communist Party has over the world’s second-largest economy.

That’s the view of prominent AI scientist Max Tegmark, who told CNBC artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer than we think and the narrative of a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China racing to build the smartest AI is a “suicide race.”

While there is no singular definition of AGI, it is broadly taken to refer to AI that can outsmart humans.

Applications like ChatGPT — that allow users to prompt a chatbot for answers — have exploded in popularity. But many AI companies are racing to develop the next level, with AI that has human-level intelligence.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said …