
Beyond Local Pattern Matching: Recent Advances in Machine Reading - andreyk
http://ai.stanford.edu/blog/beyond_local_pattern_matching/
======
nopinsight
It is noticeable that _all_ of the top 4 results in the recent Stanford
Conversational Question Answering (CoQA) challenge are from groups based in
China (the top 2 are from Microsoft Research Asia; the 3th and 4th, Sogou and
Fudan; the 5th, anonymous):

[https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/](https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/)

Chinese universities are ranked at 1st, 3th, and 4th in the world for papers
published in top AI conferences in 2018. (Tsinghua at the top; followed by
CMU, Beijing, CAS, and Stanford) Although some people might disagree with the
methodology (e.g. larger departments have an advantage), it is still a decent
indicator for China’s progress in the field.

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

Perhaps it is time for the US as a nation to spend more resources to develop
and attract more people into AI research.

See also an Economist’s review of a recent book: “In the struggle for AI
supremacy, China will prevail; Or so reckons Kai-Fu Lee, a tech insider, in
“AI Superpowers””

[https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/09/27/in-
the-s...](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/09/27/in-the-struggle-
for-ai-supremacy-china-will-prevail)

~~~
1_over_n
Yesterday i was researching IP strategies for AI companies and came across
this paper from a legal firm.

[https://www.bereskinparr.com/files/file/IAM88_AI-and-
IP_Jim%...](https://www.bereskinparr.com/files/file/IAM88_AI-and-
IP_Jim%20Hinton.pdf)

It blew my mind how much China is filing patents around AI compared to the
rest of the world. It should also be considered that from an IP perspective
American companies could be going down the trade secret route and academia is
open sourcing. I don't have any data on this. I know in the USA trade secrets
do now have some legal protection.

[https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-
started/international-...](https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-
started/international-protection/trade-secrets-policy)

~~~
speedplane
China has been filing tons of patents because of the national prestige it
brings. A large percentage are of dubious quality and they are setting
themselves up for a huge patent troll problem 10 years from now, much like the
US had as a result of bogus late 1990/early 2000s patents.

The US patent system has become much better (although Europe is still even
better). They now reject over 90% of business method patents (i.e., doing
business with a computer). Many of those would be granted in China.

The number of granted patents in any given country is not a good indicator of
technical progress.

~~~
1_over_n
So the question becomes - will China respect the USA's patents, will the USA
respect Chinese patents?

~~~
speedplane
There are well established treaties for this. No country's patent office is
forced to grant a patent filed in another country. For example, if you get a
patent granted in the U.S., there's no guarantee it'll be granted in Britain.
If you want a patent in both countries, you'll need to file a separate patent
application in both countries.

The same goes for the U.S. and China. If a U.S. company only has U.S. patents,
companies operating in China can make a product that directly infringes it.
That said, the second that product is imported into the U.S., the U.S. patent
will kick in, and you can get a judge to block it at the border.

Going back to the AI space, the fact that China has a ton of AI patents in
their country won't stop Google from developing the same in the U.S. However,
if Google tried to offer those infringing services to Chinese residents, they
could be sued/stopped in China.

~~~
JamesBarney
I think I understand how this works with a tangible good. But I have no idea
how this works for more abstract goods, for instance like a machine learning
patents.

Say I was given a u.s. patent on a an AI process that looks at photos of
parking lots and tells you number, type, and length of stay of different cars.
Now if someone steals my patent and sets up a server in country I don't like a
patent like China. And then another company sends pictures of parking lots to
the Chinese copycat company which runs my patented algorithm and then sends
them back the data.

Is this illegal? Is there any way to stop it?

~~~
speedplane
> Say I was given a u.s. patent on a an AI process .... Now if someone steals
> my patent and sets up a server in country I don't like a patent like China.
> And ... runs my patented algorithm and then sends them back the data. > > Is
> this illegal? Is there any way to stop it?

Yes, under U.S. patent law, this would still probably be illegal (but see
below for some nuance). Given how globalized our economy has become, a very
similar issue already came up over ten years ago. It wasn't between U.S. and
China, but between U.S. and Canada.

Ten years ago, Blackberry reigned supreme in cell phones, and they were a
Canadian company. They were sued by companies in U.S. courts holding U.S.
patents over networking technology. Blackberry argued that most of the tech
covered by the U.S. patents actually took place in Canada (where there were no
corresponding patents). The U.S. judges said that, even though most of the
steps were performed outside the U.S., U.S. patent law still applied. This is
the short version of the story, you can read a much better write-up here:
[https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/the-extraterritorial-
re...](https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/the-extraterritorial-reach-of-u-s-
patents-implications-for-the.html)

So, going back to your example of U.S. patented AI algorithms being run in
China: If everything stays in China, then it won't be covered by U.S. patent
law. However, even if just the results from that patented process that was
done entirely in China get imported back into the U.S., there's a good chance
that U.S. patent law would kick-in and whoever did that importing could be
sued.

That said, this is a relatively new area of patent law. Patent law has been
around for hundreds of years, but globalization has only been around for a few
decades. The truth is that U.S. judges don't come across these issues very
often, so even though it's likely illegal, maybe it isn't, it's very fact and
case-by-case specific. It's likely the exact parameters of what is and isn't
allowed will be fought in courts for many more years to come.

------
andreyk
Some other fun recent-ish developments in QA datasets:

\- Natural Questions ([https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/01/natural-questions-
new-corp...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/01/natural-questions-new-corpus-
and.html))

\- SearchQA
([https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05179](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05179))

Many AI researchers worry the community is overfitting to getting good numbers
and not thinking big enough, but it seems to me datasets evolve fast enough to
keep up with doing interesting things.

------
palad1n
At what point would we say that a machine/system actually understands natural
language? Or is the Chinese Room Argument always going to apply?

~~~
serioussecurity
Maybe we reckon with the issue that "understand" doesn't mean anything in the
absence of it's implications and we rephrase the question. What do you view as
consequences of deciding that it "understands"?

~~~
palad1n
This might go with the question of whether the Turing Test is a valid measure
of "intelligence". If we can't tell the difference between a machine
understanding something and a person, is that all that is required?

~~~
pas
There's a view that intelligence without context is meaningless. (You can't do
pattern matching without definition of what your signal is -- and if you just
use a trivial measure, like entropy, then white noise is the best signal!) So,
you can't be generally intelligent. You can be great at a lot of things, but
that means you have priors for those things, which inherently predisposes you
against other priors. (Though there are of course basically infinite
dimensions, in which you can have priors, but let's just assume some
dimensions are more important than others.)

What we want is adaptability under goal permanence, meta-goals, usually called
alignment. We want an intelligence that is very similar to us. And we like to
talk a lot, and we can talk about everything, so we can represent our
intelligence through talking, so a Turing test could be a great way to measure
how human-similar two "intelligences" are.

------
kreelman
This looks to be very useful. I wonder how long it will be before we can have
one of these datasets being used around the house. Would help with cheating on
homework!

