
China Gains on the U.S. In the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race - aaronjg
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/technology/artificial-intelligence-china-united-states.html
======
hiddencost
Many of the best AI researchers are Chinese. But they almost all work for US
companies. Which is why we cannot mess with immigration.

This article is written for people outside the field? Baidu is alright but a
bit of a shambles. All the did was build a dense GPU rack for RNN training.
Their imagenet results were from cheating. The theoretically interesting work
isn't really happening there.

The Microsoft paper was funny. It was PR BS that runs 10x real time.

Speech is nice, and iflytek does fine, but speech is becoming a commodity now.

The interesting work isn't happening in either of those companies and it's not
happening on those problems.

This article was written by someone who didn't know the field interviewing
someone who is trying to get his budget increased via fear mongering.

~~~
deepnotderp
Exactly. I deeply respect ng and his team, but they are more applied.

Also, hilariously, the article totally neglects that more research comes from
Canada and Europe (deepmind) than the US....

~~~
chronicy6
You mean US companies with international offices such as Geoff Hinton at
Google Toronto and DeepMind owned by Alphabet in the UK? Not to mention
Facebook AI Research in Paris. Yep. Canada and Europe sure are producing
strong research for the US. Thanks for the talent!

~~~
deepnotderp
MILA, Maluuba, ElementAI are all from Canada. And when you buy foreign talent,
where does the money go?

Into foreign tech economies....

------
Houshalter
>The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said
John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in
Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy
missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.

This reminds me of a famous story of an early AI system, which competed
against humans in a table top war game focused around ship design.

>After weeks of experimentation, and some 10,000 two-to-thirty-minute battles,
Eurisko came up with what would be the winning fleet. To the humans in the
tournament, the program's solution to Traveller must have seemed bizarre. Most
of the contestants squandered their trillion-credit budgets on fancy weaponry,
designing agile fleets of about twenty lightly armored ships, each armed with
one enormous gun and numerous beam weapons.

>Eurisko, however, had judged that defense was more important than offense,
that many cheap, invulnerable ships would outlast fleets consisting of a few
high-priced, sophisticated vessels. There were ninety-six ships in Eurisko's
fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor. Rather
than arming them with a few big, expensive guns, Eurisko chose to use many
small weapons.

>In any single exchange of gunfire, Eurisko would lose more ships than it
destroyed, but it had plenty to spare. The first battle in the tournament was
typical. During four rounds of fire, the opponent sank fifty of Eurisko's
ships, but it lost nineteen -all but one-of its own. With forty-six ships left
over, Eurisko won.

>Even if an enemy managed to sink all Eurisko's sitting ducks, the program had
a secret weapon -a tiny, unarmed extremely agile vessel that was, Lenat wrote,
"literally unhittable by any reasonable enemy ship." The usefulness of such a
ship was discovered during a simulated battle in which a lifeboat remained
afloat round after round, even though the rest of the ships in the fleet had
been destroyed. To counter opponents using the same strategy, Eurisko designed
another ship equipped with sophisticated guidance computer and a giant
accelerator weapon. Its only purpose was killing enemy lifeboats.

I've always wondered if a similar strategy might work in real life.

~~~
randcraw
Curious that the winning strategy resulted in the maximum loss of human life.

~~~
Houshalter
Not necessarily. The small ships probably have much smaller crews than the
large ships.

------
renesd
It's always been an international community.

People in pretty much every country are doing some pretty amazing stuff. A lot
of it you won't hear about if you limit yourself to press releases from
venture capitalists.

~~~
Roritharr
But which country will be the first to bring Skynet online?

~~~
tluyben2
Czech? [http://www.moravcik.info/](http://www.moravcik.info/)

~~~
softwarelimits
Extremely impressive website with lots of fascinating examples. I assume the
website was generated by the real-human-brain algorithm with the given task of
"maximum impress site visitor". This will change everything!

~~~
tluyben2
I ran into it on some Reddit stream and thought it was funny as he claims AGI
and he is everywhere asking/pleading for buyers. In the Netherlands we had
Sloot[0] who claimed a similar impossible feat in another field. Well Sloot
was actually claiming something 'more impossible'; I do think strong AI will
happen but we are far off while Sloot claimed something impossible (Kolmogorov
complexity is a good book about that). Sloot was believed by many and invested
in. Also by people who should know better.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot)

------
ykler
"Many Silicon Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely
with the Pentagon out of fear of losing access to China’s market." This is an
interesting assertion, but I'd like to see some evidence.

~~~
arcanus
Almost certainly a questionable assertion given how many of the big players
(FB, goog) are already locked out!

------
thinkr42
Byzantine hiring processes in the government itself doesn't help this problem.
This isn't a politica statement, if you compare USAJobs to an average tech
company you'll see an over emphasis on certifications and the like. There are
reasons for it, but it doesn't help when decision makers or project managers
don't know what real success looks like or how to even measure it.

~~~
arcanus
I'm not sure that is a problem...historically the department of Energy (DOE)
has lead Supercomputing efforts in the USA and they have focused on other
domains of interest (particularly nuclear weapons research). This field is
actually not unrelated, in terms of HPC capabilities, Numerical linear
algebra, etc to the recent AI work. But physical simulation remains the top
priority in part because AI is not seen as an energy technology.

I can state without hesitation that some of the greatest minds in
Supercomputing and computational science are permanent members of the staff at
these DOE research labs. These staff are selected much like the top AI
researchers: academic pedigree and publications in top tier research journals.

Therefore, I think it is more a problem of application. Until government has a
killer AI app, it will be hard to justify a massive investment in AI tech at
scale. Contrast that with large companies who have already deployed AI tech in
production...

------
beefsack
An article about US AI research or supercomputers wouldn't be labelled an
"arms race."

~~~
adventured
That's because it's a classic refrain that most commonly refers to
international competition more often than domestic competition, due to the
obvious broad implications to national security and defense. It's not in any
way limited to or specific to China - and it's even occasionally used
domestically in reference to tech companies battling (see: frequent arms race
references in regards to Amazon vs Google vs Microsoft in cloud).

The exact same language would be used if the US were competing against Russia
on this, and previously was used when the USSR was the primary political
competitor of the US. It has also been used to refer to competition with
Japan, now and in the past.

NYTimes, 2005, vs the Japanese (and recently ascendant China):

"A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer
performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines. And
beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan,
there is a new entrant -- China -- eager to showcase its arrival as an
economic powerhouse."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/technology/a-new-arms-
race...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/technology/a-new-arms-race-to-
build-the-worlds-mightiest-computer.html)

\---

"A Global Arms Race to Create a Superintelligent AI is Looming"

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a-global-arms-
rac...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a-global-arms-race-to-
create-a-superintelligent-ai-is-looming)

\---

"Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Warn of Artificial Intelligence Arms Race"

[http://www.newsweek.com/ai-asilomar-principles-artificial-
in...](http://www.newsweek.com/ai-asilomar-principles-artificial-intelligence-
elon-musk-550525)

\---

"How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-
amazo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-amazon-
triggered-a-robot-arms-race)

\---

"Amazon and Google Continue Cloud Arms Race With New Data Centers"

[http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/amazon-google-add-data-
centers...](http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/amazon-google-add-data-centers/)

\---

2009: "Smartphone vs. feature phone arms race heats up"

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-vs-feature-phone-
arm...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-vs-feature-phone-arms-race-
heats-up-which-did-you-buy/)

\---

"The Adultery Arms Race"

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/the-
adu...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/the-adultery-
arms-race/380794/)

------
JoeAltmaier
OR are they? Its always problematic to take Chinese scientific claims at face
value.

~~~
grzm
Do you have specific criticisms of the NYTimes piece? Reasons to think these
particular claims are false? If you do, please do share, as it would be a
substantial contribution to the conversation. Throwing aspersions or drive-by
allusions of doubt is a primary reason why we're in the current situation
where we can't seem to find agreement on so many things that should be facts.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
In addition to being the worlds largest market for acupuncture, herbology,
aphrodisiacs and a whole constellation of farce around 'chi'?

Here's some insight: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/academic-fraud-in-china-is-
getting-ou...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/academic-fraud-in-china-is-getting-out-
of-hand-1427658261)

[http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(10\)60030-X/fulltext)

[http://www.scidev.net/global/networks/editorials/china-
must-...](http://www.scidev.net/global/networks/editorials/china-must-address-
the-roots-of-scientific-fraud.html)

~~~
grzm
Your links provide more support than you comments regarding folklore. Other
cultures are no stranger to superstitions, quack remedies, and non-scientific
religious practices.

China has also progressed quite handily economically and technologically,
areas that don't admit to too much reliance on things that don't work.
Cautious skepticism isn't the same as out-of-hand dismissal.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
'Problematic' isn't quite the same as dismissal. But I get your point. Will
tone it down!

------
albertTJames
So much for the "Federation of Planets launching race" ...

~~~
albertTJames
Trekkie Peace message getting down voted on HN ?

... You guys need to get out of deep nets and go back to your classics

“Without followers, evil cannot spread.” - Spock

------
sremani
The only thing this news confirms is, there is some form of military budget
committee meeting soon.

The biggest proponents of Chinese power is department of defense.

------
laxatives
Whoa I thought John Markoff retired? Is he still active? He's been one of my
favorite NYT writers.

