China’s Yitu Wants to Transform AI Into Affordable Intelligence
The CTO of the US$2.4 billion AI firm explains how they are doing this via two critical approaches, which includes a Facebook collaboration.
Not all AI is equal, according to Dr. YAN Shuicheng, CTO of leading Chinese AI firm Yitu Technology. They differ greatly in the energy cost and data bandwidth required for processing.
At a recent high level conference of leading AI experts in China, Dr. Yan gave an example of this in the field of AI that Yitu is best known for — face recognition.
He said that many companies in China are able to produce the kind of face recognition systems required for access control at doors. But there are only a handful that are capable of providing face recognition systems for payment authentication where the numbers go up into the 10’s or 100’s of millions.
Therefore, Dr. Yan said that for AI to see mass adoption, it has to become highly efficient — in both the computational method as well as the computer chip that powers it to increase affordability.
Yitu is trying to lead the AI industry by doing both.
