
China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt - nopinsight
https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-alphabet-chairman/?partner=YahooSA&yptr=yahoo
======
polskibus
It's hard to say how much is this about scaring the government into action
(AI-McCarthyism), or about being jealous that China is not constrained like
Western countries are when experimenting with AI because of ingrained in
society respect towards privacy, human rights, having to listen to the public
opinion (democracy), etc.

In another HN thread about AI, big corporations and China, someone mentioned
that big American IT corporations are very active in China, offering their
tech for pennies just to be able to test it on a wider scale, because in the
West they can't do it (regulations, human rights, etc.).

There are many problems unsolved, where a lot of grunt work is needed and
little progress has been made in the last decades - healthcare is expensive,
many diseases are still uncurable, production is still cheaper to outsource to
other countries than do it locally because automation (not just AI, also
sensors, computing power, materials, etc.) are not there yet.

I think the general trend to see current AI iteration as the magical solutions
to all problems is dangerous, as usual the reality is much more complex and
should be tackled in a more thorough manner. Why not pay AI-specialist pay to
get the best people into healthcare, new material research, etc?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ya, it sounds like a scare tactic. China does have advantages, mainly, they
have lots of data with less concern for privacy.

The Chinese are making huge bets on AI, but they are beginning to sound like
Japan in the 1980s with their Fifth generation computing project. Actually,
there are so many analogues of China today to Japan in the 1980s (huge housing
bubble, booming economy that doesn't seem to stop, a huge bet on AI....) that
it doesn't really seem like a coincidence.

~~~
Barrin92
I don't think the comparison to 'neo tokyo' fantasies is warranted. When
people were scared of Japan taking over the world with robots, those fifth
generation projects were moonshot technologies without any clear commercial
application.

The difference is that ML today (at least the kind of technologies where China
has and is gaining an edge) are deeply embedded in the commercial sector and
public security.

We're not talking about China building a superintelligence in some kind of
basement of a research facility, we're talking about facial recognition in
public spaces, consumer products that get data from a billion customers who
all pay and live on a centralised platform and so on. That's a reality already
and it's not a stretch to say that China's environment is more suited for this
than any other place on the planet.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter
talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very
aspirational.

I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project
was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is
the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that
it led directly to the 2nd AI winter. It also correlates nicely with other
economic excesses (like China's problematic property bubble).

China still has a problem with attracting world-class talent, mainly because
of their environment (great firewall, still way too wicked pollution). There
are more Chinese working on ML in Silicon Valley then probably all foreigners
working in tech in China. So if ML is a talent game, then I don't see how
China will be able to win that in the near term, even with all their local
human resources.

~~~
nopinsight
What do you think about this? (from part of my other comment)

* 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Research Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example.

[https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-
explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/)

It is not like others do not try. This is a highly commercializable area of
research and there is no requirement to publish the technical details of the
submitted solution.

* Based on publications from 2015 onward, Peking and Tsinghua University are ranked in the world's top 5 for published papers in top AI conferences (at #3 and #5).

[http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2015/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...](http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2015/toyear/2018/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&world)

See my previous comment for more info & counterpoints about talent and
pollution.

~~~
Eridrus
It's basically the same in computer security where you now see most
vulnerabilities reported to vendors are from China. I wouldn't necessarily say
China has "beaten" the rest of the world, but rather people in the west have
basically decided that form of signaling is too expensive.

There's a lot of people publishing ML work on public datasets which barely
move the needle. It's usually not too hard to squeeze something extra into a
model to do better than the previous work, and if not there are always other
datasets, so these raw numbers don't really means lot IMO.

Not to say China won't overtake the rest of the world, eg lots of great work
coming out of MSRA, but I think that there is a lot of truth to the idea that
once you start measuring something, people start gaming it, and I think the
political environment in China encourages this gaming, so I would pay less
attention to metrics like this that can be gamed.

Even paper metrics are gameable. Most reviewers acknowledge that once you
remove the obvious accepts and obvious rejects you've got a large pile of
passable but forgettable work. So if you can just keep cranking out passable
work that fits the zeitgeist, you'll get more papers accepted.

I might be wildly off base here, I haven't tried to construct statistics, and
academia has a large amount of starfucking going on, so it may be a cultural
bias thing, but I don't get the impression that China is anywhere near
dominant yet, but yet all these statistics look great!

~~~
nopinsight
Thanks for your thoughtful reply! I think everyone, including the Chinese,
agrees that they are not (yet) dominant in AI, just that they are catching up
very fast to the best in the world. They might even beat all others in
optimizing in existing paradigms.

Part of their 2030 plan to become preeminent in AI is to develop indigenous
breakthroughs by 2025 and be equal to the leading nation by 2020. They are
very much on track to achieve the closest goal given evidence to date.

------
pedrosorio
"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to
dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational
system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to
win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions."

In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam
finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did the same 40
times (notably last year there were 13 Russian contestants, half of the
finalists).

If this is evidence that China is going to dominate AI, what does it say about
Russia?

~~~
fooker
This is evidence that the Chinese education system is not inferior. Nothing
more.

The argument about AI lead is based on other facts, not particularly this one.

~~~
pedrosorio
I don't think performance of the best on these contests says much about the
education system (other than possibly how much exposure does the education
system provide to this kind of contest from a young age).

------
olympus
He claims the US government isn't investing in AI. That's false. They're
investing in AI, they just aren't giving any money to Google. What would the
government do with an AI tuned for advertising? This is likely just Schmidt
complaining about not getting free money from the government for once.
Besides, it seems like Google is investing plenty of their own money into AI
research without the government needing to contribute.

What will kill the US in AI research is when the government starts slapping
export controls on everything and preventing foreign nationals from doing top
level AI research in the US. Then all the talent will go to other countries.

~~~
jessriedel
What US govt investments are you referring to?

~~~
olympus
There is literally millions, and probably billions of dollars of spending that
the military, NSA, and other agencies have put towards AI. Just about every
military system with a computer has an effort to get some sort of AI onboard
to decrease the workload of the operators and increase the effectiveness of
the system. There are cognitive radios that aim to be jam-proof and make
better use of the spectrum, smart ship management systems, adaptive self
defense systems for jets, etc. The NSA uses AI to filter large amounts of data
before a person ever sees it. The government is spending tons of money on AI,
but many projects are classified and you aren't going to hear Lockheed
bragging about how much money they are getting to upgrade their
ships/tanks/jets with AI.

------
WheelsAtLarge
China's will to move forward is astonishingly great. Remember that in the 70's
it was close to a 3rd world nation. In less than 50 years it's challenging the
US in technology. Sure a big part of that has been just copying what we
already know in terms of technology but I see no slowing down from their part.
To become a master at anything 1st you copy and try to match the master once
you have matched the master you move past it. China is close to matching the
master and they're not slowing down. Eric Smith is just reporting on what he
sees as an inevitable outcome.

~~~
rayiner
You can’t extrapolate trends continuously forward into the future. At the turn
of the 20th century Russia was closer in GDP per capita to India and China
than to the US. By the 1950s, they beat the US in every space race milestone,
and would’ve beaten us to the moon if the head of their space program hadn’t
died at an inopportune time. But ultimately it wasn’t sustainable.

------
rayiner
Fun fact: China’s GDP per capita growth over the last 25 years is only
modestly more than Japan’s GDP per capita growth from 1970-1995 (20.5x versus
24.5x).

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I wonder how China would cope with a long period of economic stagnation like
Japan has had without the democratic release valve of being able to vote in
another party. I wouldn't be surprised to see it all unravel.

------
yusee
GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam.
If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They
are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are
increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying
government.

Dear Alphabet,

Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical
balance of power.

~~~
joshuamorton
(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity)

What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive
spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are
less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm
intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for
gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

~~~
singularity2001
How about: I send someone an email, he answers, his answer is classified as
spam. That's as broken as it can get!

(presumably because google doesn't like 'free' servers)

~~~
aianus
Maybe your friend's email server is misconfigured? Incorrect SPF records, etc?

~~~
_dps
I think the point was that initiating communication with an address is an
extremely strong signal of willingness to receive (vs clicking a link, or
replying, etc.). I think it's reasonable to expect to receive responses to
proactively-initiated threads even if your correspondent isn't optimized for
deliverability.

~~~
aianus
I disagree, just because I’ve emailed support@visa.com in the past does not
mean I want every spam phishing email pretending to come from support@visa.com
reaching my inbox.

~~~
_dps
You make a fair point but you've drawn a slightly broader scenario than I had
in mind. Surely if you initiate an email to myfriend@obscureserver.com with
the title "Hey buddy" and you get back a reply titled "Re: Hey buddy" from
someone alleging to be myfriend@obscureserver.com, you'd want that in your
inbox and not spam even with a misconfigured sender on your friend's end...
no?

Edit: my ideal UX in this situation would be to get the mail in inbox, with a
small notice saying "Unverified" and a mouseover/hover text explaining what
that means re: SPF records; from there if you mark it as spam it would treat
such unverified mail from that domain as spam on an ongoing basis

~~~
singularity2001
yes! I wish I could upvote more.

------
yusee
China is even more of a surveillance society than the US. America's top
advertiser isn't happy. I am OK with America losing the race for total state
control of information.

------
kozikow
Looking at it from different angle than policy and surveillance other comments
are focusing on:

\- I can't find any concrete data, but it feels like at least 50% of
publications on conferences like NIPS or CVPR are made by Chinese nationals.
Even if it is initially from USA universities, many researchers are going
back, either due to unfavorable Visa situation or else.

\- Even among Silicon Valley investors, funds with China roots are relatively
much more into AI startups

------
kore
The Chinese government's R&D initiatives are what's making the difference
here. They've further laid out specific goals for particular technologies such
as automated vehicles, drones, medical diagnosis, and machine translation, and
their rate of R&D spend is on pace to overtake the US in the coming years.

For all its faults, their leadership has their eyes properly set on science
and technology as a means to challenge the US economically and militarily.
They're incentivizing the proper areas where they want industry to operate,
and are better poised to take advantage of it. The US government is hampered
by dysfunction in comparison.

Would hope the US sees what's at risk here, and moves from underestimating the
threat, to overestimating it and taking massive action as they often do.

Better summary here: [https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-
china](https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china)

------
helthanatos
This is the same as making government issues partisan to develop some sort of
race and opposition. China already does the vast majority of manufacturing
technology. It doesn't really matter what country does it. In the end, it will
just be a smaller amount of money going to US businesses. Better ai has many
applications but personal robot butlers and such have a while.

------
alexnewman
i read the research. chinese contributions are amazing but it’s a world wide
phenomena

------
pacala
Not sure about "will surpass". Possibly the inflection point already happened.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china-
artificial-intelligence/516615/)

> The 2017 AAAI meeting—which ultimately relocated to San Francisco—wrapped up
> just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in
> the historically U.S.-dominated conference. A nearly equal number of
> accepted papers came from researchers based in China and the U.S. “This is
> pretty surprising and impressive given how different it was even three, four
> years back,” says Rao.

------
nopinsight
To give additional evidence why Eric Schmidt's comment has a basis in reality
(and to reply to many sceptical comments here):

* 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example.

[https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-
explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/)

It is not like others do not try. This is a highly commercializable area of
research and there is no requirement to publish the technical details of the
submitted solution.

* Based on publications from 2015 onward, Peking and Tsinghua University are ranked in the world's top 5 for published papers in top AI conferences (at #3 and #5).

[http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...](http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&world)

* China plans to add AI and programming courses in primary education. It is likely that soon, if not already, the _proportion_ of US middle and high schools that offer computer science courses will be lower than China's.

[http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0828/c90000-9261282.html](http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0828/c90000-9261282.html)

* Most Chinese kids spend a significant amount of time working on their academics, even outside of school (whether this is good or bad at the individual level is different from the main topic of discussion here), while the same cannot be said about most American children.

* Since 2000, China's team was no. 1 in International Math Olympiad 12 times (out of 18) and 5 times at no. 2

[https://imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=CHN](https://imo-
official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=CHN)

* Mathematics is an important foundation of AI. One needs to be relatively competent at math to understand most AI research papers and even textbooks. The level of math required may look basic to some HN readers but it still takes many years of focused learning to master for most people. Many smart people do not master math simply because they haven't spent the time.

The difference in math skills between the US and China high school students is
evident in PISA 2015 results. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests
that the potential _proportion_ of AI-capable natives in China could be 5
times as large as the US. Since China has more than 4 times the population,
the potential _number_ could be 20 times.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569339)

* China is doing everything it can to attract back their top talent as well as those from other countries. A reason for pollution curb, which starts to become successful, is to satisfy talent's requirement for quality of life. They have instituted a competitive program to attract global talent. (At the same time, the US is not exactly sending a welcome signal.)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_\(China\))

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-
ar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial-
intelligence.html)

~~~
philee
Counter-example: Geoffrey Hinton (who developed backpropagation), has a self-
proclaimed phobia of mathematics. There's plenty more to innovation than
solving those IMO problems, Google Code Jams, etc, because they involve very
specific practice (and over-fit the needed skillsets).

It's instead the encouraging atmosphere and resultant inflows of capital
(intellectual and otherwise) that may put China ahead in the future.

~~~
nopinsight
Geoffrey Hinton may not be excellent at math at the professional level but if
one watches his talks and lectures, it’s clear that he is more competent than
99% of most populations.

AI requires more than math, but one cannot work competently in AI without
being competent at math. Based on teaching experience, I would estimate the
lower threshold to be about 2SD above global average (or equivalent to 700
PISA score in math), which might mean less than 2% of US high school students
are above that threshold.

------
praulv
No doubt given a giant step ahead by open source initiatives such as
TensorFlow, ironically.

------
aje403
We’re way ahead in cryptocurrency startups. We should definitely take that
into account.

------
Chardok
Yet another US tech billionaire practically fetishizing China for their
devotion to technology over people...

Sure, I can certainly get behind greater funding for scientific research and
education for our benefit, but China is _certainly_ not a country I would like
to emulate whatsoever.

My biggest question is, what is the meaning and implication of China
"dominating" the AI industries? China overtaking the US in military and
commercial might? This honestly seems unlikely.

And a follow up question is, besides government funding, what else is China
doing to secure AI dominance? Putting human rights and regulations on the back
burner would appear give them a competitive advantage - but is this worth the
cost of privacy and freedom for the average citizen?

'"Shockingly some of the best people are in countries we won't let into
America,' he said. "Iran produces some of the smartest and top computer
scientists in the world. I want them here. I want them working for Alphabet
and Google. It's crazy not to let these people in."'

Well now I am not following this logic at all. What is China doing to make
working there more attractive? I would imagine the US looks a lot more
attractive than China in terms of freedom and safety regulations.

If anyone has a copy of the AI report in English I would greatly appreciate
it.

~~~
AstralStorm
Easy to answer. China has billions of people and is getting exceedingly good
at finding enough talent in this huge pool. This is sort of similar in Russia
which has the additional advantage of better tuned education system and just
as few scruples.

~~~
pedrosorio
> China has billions of people

Calm down, it hasn't even reached 1.5 billion yet.

------
chvid
China's GDP outgrows the west's by 5-10 percentage points pr. year. This means
that in about 10 years China's economy in size will be twice that of the US.

That means China will dominate in most engineering fields. Also some where the
US today is an absolute leader.

~~~
Spooky23
China is a juggernaut and will overtake the US, but I would guess in 20-30
years.

Economic figures from China are not very reliable. But they are making smart
investments while the US is mostly moving money from one pile to another.

