China Is Leading the AI? NewYork Times Said Yes
We all know that China was doing good at Artificial Intelligence, but except those show-off BAT Internet Giants, there is no other evidence to prove this. But there is an increasing number of news reports about Chinese AI market. Last week, Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.? from NewYork Times revealed the reason why China is ruling the AI world where West and East would fight the Third World War in Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?.
After his postdoctorate, A young man named Soren Schwertfeger chose China to do research in Artificial Intelligence instead of Europe or America where used to be regarded as the birthplace of A.I. But in China, Soren got a huge sponsorship to build his own AI Lab, that won’t happen in another country, even in his hometown German.
According John Markoff, the writer of this report, told us the technology power balance is shifting from West to East. AI experts believed China is only one step behind America. And I had seen it by my eyes last week.
I was in Beijing last weekend, and was invited to an A.I. summit named GMIS — Chinese just love all kinds of summits — to talk with some local expert. And yes, NYT is right about this, China is leading the A.I. and one startup even wanted to set up a gamble with IBM Watson.
You might think China is still the old-fashion Eastern country where people are still living under the standard. Actually, Beijing is investing vast sums of money into Artificial Intelligence to build a fancy high-tech and sci-fi world in the country with the help of machine learning. A lot of startups shown in the GMIS have presented their new technology and new algorithms are helping the government to tackle the censorship problem, public crime, and improving the efficiency of lending money, tracking personal credit. And they are hoping to replace many work position by machines which make fewer mistakes and cost less.
With money, new technology and application scenarios, AI becomes the must-have stuff to every company and everyone’s daily life. When the US are adopting Apple Pay, Chinese people just forget their wallets at home. Most of them can enjoy a convenient life with only a smartphone, no matter Android or iPhone, cheap or flagship.
In GMIS, the middle-aged businessman who gambled 100 million RMB with IBM Watson told me that he was 100% sure to win this gamble.
Yang Yang, CEO of iPIN, a Cognition Intelligence analysis startup in China. He told me his company could be the Chinese Watson, but iPIN could do better than IBM Watson in some aspects.
“I believe that IBM has no idea about the Chinese market. As the largest real estate enterprise in China, Wanda Group cooperated with IBM to solve its problems, like cloud computing and Smart Rent system. Watson is perfect to build the Smart Rent system,” Yang told me, “ but the thing is, Watson, knows more than Artificial Intelligence but the Chinese culture, environment, and economy.”
As an Expert System, all the data and rules in Watson’s database were written by experts from different industry. And thanks to its expertise knowledge, like finance and health, Watson got a lot of orders from ABB, Citi Bank, GE and other big brands.
But Yang Yang thought that Watson Artificial Intelligence will lose the gamble of building a Smart Rent System for Wanda, “to cognitive intelligence, Watson has scored impressive achievement in America, but now it comes to China. I am sorry to say that Watson will fail to complete this task because it doesn’t understand China. “
And Yang was confident to his cognitive intelligence, as he said iPIN built the first Social Economy Graph in China and it used the machine to learn that knowledge from the beginning, so that this cognitive intelligence could be applied to almost every industries, such as human resource and career planning.
He showed me the iPIN article from Wall Street Journal to make me trust him he can win the gamble, “If I lose the gamble and Watson did it, I would send our 100 million RMB value AI system as a gift to Wanda.” However, since last weekend, Wanda hasn’t responded to this gamble.
This seems straightforward on the surface, AI is changing our life. China is a country with 1.4 billion population and 800 million smartphone users, that makes China the best place to test new ideas. Every tiny need from the market could worth billion and every smart change in the workplace or in the apps could lead an enormous development to the society. And to my surprise, people are willing to accept those changes. The rate is even higher than the United States.
Compared with other countries, China provided more capital and policy to support their A.I. startups. Startups from China got more investment from the capital market. For all the support, the government may use the technology on Internet censorship or other restriction places. But to AI customers, AI is the cutting-edge solution to their business in fierce competition with transnational corporations.
