Artificial Intelligence in China
Artificial Intelligence is not just a tech trend anymore, it’s staring us in the face and is ready to transform technology as we know it. Within a decade from now, nearly all technology that runs our businesses will be touched by AI. Under the current administration, China has made tremendous
progress in many fields. They don’t just have the world’s largest population that looks all set to be the world’s largest economy, they also want to be world leaders in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
With an ambitious goal set for the year 2030, there are a flurry of milestones to be reached by the end of 2020, which include making significant contributions towards AI research, being a favourable destination for world’s brightest minds in AI and having an AI eco-system that rivals world leaders –
milestones all of which they’re very likely to achieve.
If we go by the numbers, China has already overtaken the US in published AI papers. And, if the current trends keep up, China is all set to overtake the US in the most-cited 50% of papers this year, in the most-cited 10% of papers next year and in 1% most-cited papers by 2025. It can be argued that Chinese numbers are often fabricated on many accounts but if true, this is very impressive.
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — collectively known as BAT are all part of a well-organized and highly capitalised AI. They’re well established in major American cities of Seattle and San Francisco, and are investing significantly in US start-ups. With near monopoly over a huge Chinese market, getting in
bed with the BAT is a highly lucrative deal for start-ups willing to expand their global footprint. A classic example for this scenario is the Missouri based facial-recognition start-up named Zoloz, which was invested in by the Ant Financial Group from China; became a major component for AliPay’s
payment service and gained access to millions and millions of users in the Chinese market.
There are currently a massive 14 Chinese organizations valued over $1 billion. Consolidated together, these unicorns clock in at a staggering $40.5 billion. VC capital investment has grown 4 times between 2016–2018, surpassing an aggregate of $8 billion. A more focussed analysis of this data reveals that the Chinese account for a mammoth 56% of all money contributed, and 8 of the 10 greatest deals. In 2018 alone, the investment on AI in China was 3 times the money put in by the US, and the average deal size in China was 9 times that of the US.
China has some of the world leaders in AI, computer vision, speech recognition and NLP including SenseTime, UniSound, iFLYTEK and Face++. But the country still lags behind in shaping core tech tools for AI. An example for the same is open-source platforms like TensorFlow and Caffe; used to
design, build and train the algorithms that help computers function more humanly. In contrast, PaddlePaddle — a major open-source platform built by Baidu is used as a quick fix for development of AI products.
China also lags behind in hardware. The greatest computing chip design capacity lies in the US, and almost all leading AI-enabled semiconductor chips are made by NVIDIA, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices etc.- all out of China. Fixing these issues at hand would pave a sure-shot path for China to
meet it’s long term AI goals, and combined with a newfound and strong ability to retain/hold on to talented researchers, China will probably wield tremendous influence in the cognitive tech market in times to come. However, a major factor that may cause China to lose the AI race is privacy as foreign enterprises may not want to trust their data with Chinese companies owing to massive control by Chinese government on any data held within it’s borders and lack of transparency. Privacy, confidentiality and lack of soft power is the biggest roadblock to China’s success in the domain and in my opinion, may very well cause it to lose it’s global competency, however domestically Chinese companies will continue performing well.
