
China has become a major player in AI - gk1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial-intelligence.html
======
aub3bhat
This trend is also evident in conferences like ICML, CVPR and EMNLP.[1] I have
a semi-popular open source ML project [2] and the repo gets more Chinese
visitors/users (from posts on Weibo/WeChat etc.) than all other countries
including USA.

I think Chinese researchers & government have a key advantage in collecting
enormous datasets, e.g. I wouldn't be amazed if they end up with state of the
art models for problems such as object-detection/segmentation for videos taken
from Vehicles, Medicine/Radiology and face recognition [3]. Several US
strategic funding agencies seem to be pursuing projects with this implicit
assumption.

While american government agencies do collect data at a similar scale (Body
Cams, Police dashcams), inefficiency in data sharing significantly complicate
their use.

[1] [https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-
institutio...](https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institution-
stats-bad8d2943f5d)

[2] [http://www.deepvideoanalytics.com/](http://www.deepvideoanalytics.com/)

[3]
[https://github.com/seetaface/SeetaFaceEngine](https://github.com/seetaface/SeetaFaceEngine)

On an unrelated note: If you have a popular Github repo, you can view the
Google Analytics style stats under graphs/traffic for referring urls/unique-
visitor counts etc.

~~~
visarga
This is not news to anyone who reads AI papers: the number of Chinese authors
is amazing.

~~~
dirtyaura
Crazy thought: what if the AI is in 10-20 years the first field in which major
breakthroughs will be first published in Mandarin instead of in English.
Language is power, and currently English speaking countries have the edge.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Those top-rated Chinese researchers are publishing in English. Their Chinese-
only venues are not at the caliber that they would consider publishing ground
breaking work to.

~~~
taneq
Yet.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Critical mass is a weird thing.

------
shriphani
This is a simple function of the number of tinkerers available.

Any ML project I've worked on has been a lot of tinkering - not unlike the
sort of craftsmanship one associates with woodworking and blacksmithing.

Tinkerers gave us Google, Facebook and of course modern civilization.

Tinkerers need the Medici family equivalent. Silicon Valley has that in
spades. The Chinese graduate students I met and knew brought this tinkerer's
spirit and the American university atmosphere allowed them to unleash their
potential (check out who features in the author lists of CMU, Stanford, MIT's
papers at NIPS, ICML etc.).

That state of mind and not a top-down approach is what we need.

More Ben Franklins, Robert Hookes, and Issac Newtons; fewer 5-year planning
commissions.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Reading this article gives me the feeling that new technologies simply cannot
get off the ground without central government planning and billions of dollars
in taxpayer spending. I guess it's up to the Chinese government to decide
whether China wants to keep testing this hypothesis over and over against all
odds.

~~~
Seanny123
That's literally the thesis of “The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public
vs. private sector myths” by Dr. Mazzucato.

I wrote a summary if you're interested: [https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-
review-the-entrepreneuria...](https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-the-
entrepreneurial-state-8fa47c4e8056)

~~~
afsina
There are anti-theses for the issue. Two criticizing the book mentioned:

[https://mises.org/library/government-spending-innovation-
tru...](https://mises.org/library/government-spending-innovation-true-cost-
higher-you-think)

and

[http://pricesandmarkets.org/volume-3-issue-3-winter-2015/mar...](http://pricesandmarkets.org/volume-3-issue-3-winter-2015/mariana-
mazzucato-the-entrepreneurial-state/)

~~~
Seanny123
I wasn't totally convinced by the first linked essay. The primary arguments
presented seem to be:

\- Government funded development only gives the government what it wants while
the citizens remain unsatisfied. This is due to a lack of "market tests". \-
We never tested the alternative where the government doesn't fund research and
let private companies innovate instead.

Dr. Mazzucato addresses this in her book. She notes that the government needs
to provide a pipeline from basic research to marketability. She also argues
that the last twenty years, in various countries, have shown that trusting
private companies to innovate doesn't give better returns. Also, I feel like
Dr. Glein is over-simplifying Dr. Mazzucato's argument by claiming she argues
that "many of the technologies and innovations we now value were produced
single-handedly by government". Dr. Mazzucato routinely celebrates the ability
of private companies to integrate innovative technologies for the public.
She's mostly arguing that these companies should be taxed better (more
efficiently? realistically?) by licensing the technologies.

However, the argument Dr. Glein links to
([https://www.jstor.org/stable/116937?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/116937?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)),
is very interesting! It claims that R&D personnel are a finite resource and
government funding crowds out the supply of talent for the private sector. I
don't know why, but I thought the supply was elastic? Maybe because I over-
idealize immigration?

The second essay seems to mostly re-iterate the importance of the "crowding
out" effect. It also notes that Mazzucato got some data wrong because: "But in
the thirties governments in the US did not fund long-term fundamental
research, so companies did it themselves. Now that governments do fund long-
term fundamental research, industry needs no longer do so: yet again Professor
Mazzucato advocates the very policies that lead to the outcomes she deplores."

 _tl;dr_ people seem to be getting different conclusions from datasets I
haven't seen and I need to do more research into the "crowding out effect"

~~~
raverbashing
> Government funded development only gives the government what it wants while
> the citizens remain unsatisfied. This is due to a lack of "market tests"

As much as I consider myself libertarian, this is where they go off the
rocker.

Basic research cannot be market driven. Especially a market that's mostly
worried about next quarter

Most of what we consider fundamental inventions have started in academia and
were snubbed by the market, with very rare exceptions

Funnily enough those that have invested in basic research have reaped lots of
results (like the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company)

~~~
afsina
Actually academia is not necessary dependent on Government. Universities can
be private or privately funded and still do basic scientific research.

You can read an old piece on the issue from Murray Rothbard:

[https://mises.org/library/science-technology-and-
government-...](https://mises.org/library/science-technology-and-government-0)

~~~
raverbashing
Yes but it's mostly funded by philanthropy and tax breaks.

Nobody does basic research thinking about a specific market issue

------
axaxs
I almost wonder if this was a ploy by the American companies. AI is being
injected into all apps and even pushed as major feature, but, at least in my
circle of friends, nobody cares or wants that. Most people use Whatsapp, with
no AI. Google is trying Allo, to no success, and Facebook is pushing M, also
to no success. I think AI is brilliant and could be the future, but from my
experience, people generally don't want it in the ways it's being pushed. I
definitely see the 'AI' and 'ML' markets, somewhat tied together, switching
gears soon.

~~~
kyleschiller
Facebook's M has had limited success, but on the other hand, News Feed, the
core of Facebook's business, is build entirely around AI. And Google, of
course, has had plenty of success with AI outside of Allo.

I wouldn't say "nobody cares or wants" AI, just that companies are still
trying to figure out where it's best used.

~~~
axaxs
You're right...kinda. AI is used in many places. Where it's advertised as a
feature? Failure. Where it's used in the backend? People don't seem to have
much of a choice. I stand by my statement.

~~~
euske
Back in 90s, some Japanese manufacturers (e.g. Panasonic) tried to sell AI-
based home appliances such as rice cookers or washing machines. The buzzword
then was "Fuzzy Logic" instead of NN. Don't know how successful they were, but
it seemed like a classic case of selling features instead of stories. Ordinary
people don't buy stuff because of its features.

~~~
justinhj
I think fuzzy logic controllers are very common in appliances. Samsung even
has a neuro fuzzy logic washing machine that uses optical sensors to see how
clean the water is. I think consumers need a fancy sounding technology on
their appliances even if they don't know what it means exactly.

------
rustacean
I come from China, many people around me say that the reason of high
proportion of Chinese authors in AI papers is many Chinese researchers just
pour their "trash" into journals, it's a fake sense that China has become a
major player in AI.

U.S. and the other English researchers have done most of the
essential/landmark jobs in AI, Chinese authors contribute less.

------
jjawssd
Chinese students are getting top tier educations in the United States only to
be forced to return home because of absurd F visa restrictions which
effectively prohibit them from gainful employment in the United States after
completing their studies. It's pitiful and sad.

~~~
GuiA
Don't know why you're being downvoted, because that exact thing has happened
to many of my former lab mates. Giving a green card to anyone with a graduate
degree in STEM fields would be the most sensible thing to do if the US wanted
to avoid the reverse brain drain of foreign graduates educated mostly on the
US taxpayer's money.

The vast majority of those grads would be very happy to stay in the US.

~~~
dis-sys
That is not true and the reason is obvious - bamboo ceiling in American
companies. Think about it - Chinese grads have far higher chance to be
promoted to a senior position in companies like BAT and all of them pay you
well.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The head of Microsoft today is Indian, Qi Lu was, until recently, head of
apps, Harry Shrum runs tech. Does the bamboo ceiling really exist in tech?

Now, definitely for laowai working in China, there is a bamboo ceiling, almost
all the senior leaders are going to be Chinese or Taiwanese :)

~~~
im3w1l
laowai = foreigner

------
killin_dan
How many times is this title going to be changed? I've seen it changed at
least three times so far this evening.

Titles should be locked to the article title to minimize confusion, imo.

~~~
tim333
I have to say the original title "Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?"
probably gives a better idea of what it's about than the modified versions.

~~~
dang
We change titles that have trollish qualities and that has two: inciting
nationalist emotion and bringing out the Betteridges.

------
masthead
IMO, America will still be the leader in AI. The main difference between China
and America is, China is more product focused, America is more math/logic
focused.

------
remir
I think the term artificial intelligence is incorrect. What we're currently
building is, IMO, artificial intellect.

I view intelligence as the capacity to use resources, including the intellect,
wisely and creatively. The current system we're building have no self-
awareness and no will, so they cannot really be intelligent.

If we want to build intelligent machines, we have to understand the
architectures of the mind. We use memory as a sort of mental matter for the
formulation of thoughts that we structure in a certain way to formulate
ideas/concepts and then we go out and build things. We are builders because we
are thinkers and we are conscious about being able to think.

But what is a thought, really? What is consciousness?

Look at the size of our brain next to the huge computers and data centers
we're building for "AI". Our brain is small, yet was able to _think_ about how
to build these systems.

We believe we're going to develop "artificial intelligence" by building
massive computers and data centers. How absurd is that?

Folks, to build intelligent machines, we have to build _thinking_ machines and
for this, we'll have to truly understand how the mind works and when we do
this, I believe we'll be quite surprised.

~~~
elementalest
> I think the term artificial intelligence is incorrect. What we're currently
> building is, IMO, artificial intellect.

The rest of your comment contradicts this statement.

Dictionary definition of intellect is "the faculty of reasoning and
understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters".
Dictionary definition for intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply
knowledge and skills".

Current AI has great difficulty in abstract matters/thought, let alone
understanding something beyond simply a series of learned patterns.

> If we want to build intelligent machines, we have to understand the
> architectures of the mind.

We have intelligent machines now, many which outperform human capacity for
specific tasks. If your talking about strong artificial intelligence, then I
wouldn't necessarily disagree, but maybe it could go the other way. By
developing strong AI, we can understand the architecture of the mind. Maybe
strong AI can be developed with the intellect of a cat/dog, and that gives
insight into the human mind.

> We believe we're going to develop "artificial intelligence" by building
> massive computers and data centers. How absurd is that?

No one who is knowledgeable about AI actually believes this (based on your
definition of AI).

> Folks, to build intelligent machines, we have to build thinking machines and
> for this, we'll have to truly understand how the mind works and when we do
> this, I believe we'll be quite surprised.

You ask the question "what is a thought" above, then state we need to have
thinking machines to make intelligent machines. One could argue machines today
think, one could argue alphago 'thinks'. Using your definition of
intelligence, we have AI today that meets your requirements. Wisdom is
knowledge with good judgement and creativity is exploration with
experimentation. There is plenty of academic work out there which covers all
this.

