The AGI war is starting. And the US isn’t far ahead of China. If US-based companies and labs don’t gain mass access to exclusive annotated datasets, zettabytes of the highest-quality storage that is currently privately hoarded, we risk losing the AGI war against China. We need you to join the AGI race; your data matters, that’s why we pay you for it.

Let me elaborate.

We currently still have an edge on China; we are earlier, poached the highest quality of AI researchers, and own the best models available. There are two issues, though.

Problem 1:

The AGI program in China is centralized, while we have quite a tough competition in the US with OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic, and xAI.

Problem 2:

China has the authoritarian means to ignore consumer privacy; they can mass collect data and use it in their centralized AGI 2030 plan without retail ever having a say over their data or getting a penny back.

In this high-stakes contest, the latter issue - data availability - has become the pivotal factor and key concern over who wins and who loses. In other words, the nation with the best data may ultimately dominate the AGI era. Modern AI systems are ever-hungry black boxes that require a constant stream of new data, and China currently has the edge in terms of accessibility to new data, allowing them to scale their datasets. China generates terabytes more information than the US on a daily basis. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous Taiwanese tech investor, often calls China the “Saudi Arabia of data”, given the sheer amount of data AI models can train on. This is a huge problem for the US. You don’t see these billion-dollar investments and multi-million-dollar lawsuits regarding consumer data inside AI training for no reason. In China, on the other hand, you’re seeing no lawsuits, mass surveillance is exclusively given to the centralized Chinese AGI program, where they can fine-tune their models.

The increasing gap in data accessibility over time - US vs China (numbers are estimated)

Let’s look at the US as a contrast. Here we have the tightest of regulations, limited data availability for labs & leading companies, and even the collected data from companies like Meta faces intellectual property law, privacy norms, and public scrutiny. Most high-quality data in the U.S. remains siloed in private hands, in no way available for OpenAI etc. All of this leads to the danger we face right now: being overtaken by China in the AGI race. The US government should act now and treat the AGI race with the same priority as it treated the Manhattan or Apollo Projects.

China is investing billions into its AGI program (numbers are estimated)

Our cultural goal should be to instill a sense of urgency in the Western population and among Silicon Valley leaders, making the race towards AGI a patriotic duty that everyone should contribute to together. Your duty as a citizen should be to help your country win this race. Looking back at the Apollo missions and how they instilled emotional support from the Western Hemisphere, we can clearly see the difference from today’s race towards AGI. This shouldn’t be the case. While the more symbolic target will always create more backwind, this race towards achieving AGI here inside Silicon Valley will shape our future in an even more potent way. It’s necessary to make the average Western citizen understand that they can contribute to this victory by helping labs and large companies train models with their data. Just as the US rallied behind the Apollo missions, uniting engineers, schoolchildren, and the common American man in a common purpose & goal, the AGI race calls on every citizen to pitch in. Back in the 1960s, families across the Western Hemisphere watched the lift-off, felt pride, and sent their own messages to the astronauts. Today, the mission is not to reach the Moon, but to secure our future intelligence. By sharing your data, you’re joining a digital space program: Your very own contribution to national security and innovation.

Your data matters. Probably much, much more than you think.

This article isn’t necessarily about our startup Kled, even though we aim to be the changing factor in this race. I want to highlight that your data can be the deciding factor on who wins and who loses. You choose whatever data marketplace, whatever company you use. Use us, use our future competition, but don’t keep being sidelined, wasting your opportunity to monetise your data and, most importantly, not help in the race to AGI.