I'm of the mind that China has the best shot at building AGI in the near future for the exact reason that if they choose to, they can mandate collection and processing of vast amounts of user data.

They also have a pretty amazing group of ML developers, even if they haven't made the most public progress or had as much notoriety as Bengio, Russell, Lecun et al.

One thing I find striking is that Ng left Baidu with very little discussion of why given how much progress they had been making. It's possible that he felt his role was to start and grow the Baidu AI enterprise and then move on. However I would speculate that Baidu was increasingly collaborating with the CPC and he might have not wanted to be as heavily involved in that, given that he is more Western, being raised in London and was Hong Kongese rather than culturally Han.