
China may match or beat America in AI - edward
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21725018-its-deep-pool-data-may-let-it-lead-artificial-intelligence-china-may-match-or-beat-america
======
ChuckMcM
Here I was looking for the Dr. Strangelove equivalent of the "AI Gap" :-)

Given that in the next four years it is likely that more than half of the PhDs
awarded by top US schools are awarded to foreign nationals[1], and our current
government policy is to restrict immigration as much as possible, we are on a
path to insuring that soon the world will have a much better pool of talent to
draw on to do the research than the US will.

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/07/13/Editorial-
Opinion/Graphics/KF_Report.pdf)

~~~
erva
Not to sound like an anti-intellectual, but it could be a mistake to assume
that innovation comes from academia. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a convincing
chapter (I think it is Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds to Fly) in his book
"Antifragile" about this very thing.

Then there are cultural differences that could be at play concerning
innovation. It is a general observation that east asian cultures tend to
suppress risk-taking and innovation. Whereas, western cultures seem to promote
risk-taking and innovation. That is not to say that there aren't risk takers
in China and risk averse individuals in the West...just that overall there may
be asymmetry. And, very little asymmetry can create very big differences.

So, have all the smartest people you want, doing all the research you want;
but if they have no pressure to put that research to practice, nor a desire or
support to take the risks associated with implementation then you might as
well have nobody doing anything.

Just a thought.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Not to sound like an anti-intellectual, but could it be a misnomer to assume
> that innovation comes from academia.

The use of “misnomer” in that sentence is, itself, misnomer. What you describe
is, perhaps, a mistake, but not in naming.

~~~
erva
A wordsmith I am not. Thanks for the correction.

~~~
xapata
Friendly writing advice: use simple words. Elongated romance (etymologically-
Latin) terms sound pompous. Short words are better. Think "gut" not "stomach".

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brndnmtthws
They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there
aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer
code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use
Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

~~~
kyleschiller
'It's all just computer code'

Are you saying no software has trade secrets?

Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read
more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but
nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC.

You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and
they're far from becoming a world leader.

~~~
brndnmtthws
Most of the time, secrets and other forms of protectionism are techniques used
for covering up incompetence, or hiding bad behaviour.

~~~
elefanten
bold claim. citation needed for "most of the time".

common counterpoints: secrets can be operationally necessary, secrets can
create economic value.

------
bitxbitxbitcoin
I guess it's worth asking - what will the differences between Western and
Eastern AI be, if any? Will/can cultural differences in philosophy make their
way into competing AI via Conway's Law?

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gsdfg4gsdg
Of course they will. Americans have turned on each other in their period of
greatest economic vulnerability, basically self-destructing while the Chinese
government gladly hands out 5x your research grant from elsewhere to do that
research in China. America's running on desirability to high-skill immigrants
and existing ecosystems, both of which are fading fast. NIH is halving budgets
while China is multiplying them by 10. The West is fucked, I just wish I spoke
Chinese.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I up-voted you, even though we disagree a bit. A friend went to work in Hong
Kong years ago because it was easier to get long term AI research money than
in the USA. I think he is still happy with the support that he gets.

A little off topic: here in the USA, every medium and large company seems to
be morphing into an 'AI company' which I think is generally a good thing since
individually they can all take advantage of control over their own application
stacks and data sources. Many people concentrate on the advantages of huge
companies like Google/Microsoft/Facebook in AI development, but there is
plenty of opportunity for smaller companies to enhance their own systems with
machine learning.

------
ausjke
first, it catches up with economics, second, the rising middle class demand
for more democracy to upgrade the existing political system, smoothly
hopefully, and last they begin to beat US all around, purely due to the
population and an education first tradition, with east-asia's above-average IQ
as the base and the much-better economy as the booster.

------
some1else
Lots of domain experts casually mention that there's nothing defensible in a
well trained model.

If that's what gets you going: Russia could also match or beat America in AI.

~~~
kyleschiller
The article is subtitled "Its deep pool of data may let it lead in artificial
intelligence" for a reason, you can't just pull a "well trained" model out of
thin air, and proprietary data is absolutely defensible.

~~~
visarga
You'd think China would have an advantage here. But the kind of special data
only Google and FB have is mostly related to ads and people profiles. That's
not the kind of data you need to advance AI.

Instead, what is needed is user labeled images, videos, text, speech and of
course, simulations (games, VR) for virtual robotics and reinforcement
learning agents. These kinds of data and simulations are open sourced and
growing. Once there is a sufficient collection of training data, it's cheap to
train your neural nets.

Even today, there is much more data than scientists care to use. For example,
ImageNet is over 1TB, but a smaller portion of it is used routinely (it has
21841 topics but usually just 1000 of them are used in research papers). So
it's not the lack of images that's keeping them. China would have no advantage
here. Everyone has approximately the same level, the best paper of last year
is the average of this year. That's about AI in general - but regarding self
driving cars and ads Google is cooking in secret so it might be a little more
ahead.

~~~
cat199
> But the kind of special data only Google and FB have is mostly related to
> ads and people profiles. That's not the kind of data you need to advance AI.
> > Instead, what is needed is user labeled images, videos, text, speech.

umm:

google image search, all html embedded/related metadata, adwords itself
serving as a refined metadata/tagging and ontology database building engine,
recaptcha 'how many buildings are in this picture' puzzles, android debug
settings where things are uploaded, google drive cloud storage, gmail, the
google speaker gizmo and voice activated phone agent, google voice voip,
google chat, maps annotations to pictures/gps coordinates, etc etc etc and
yadda yadda yadda...

not sure what else you need as far as those sources..

~~~
visarga
Everyone has access to image search results (from multiple providers).
Ontologies such as DBpedia and WikiData with billions of triples are open
source, don't see why they couldn't closely track closed-doors ontologies such
as the one used by Google. The picture puzzles are useless - we already have
superhuman ability to classify traffic signs and storefronts. Android debug
data and map data are irrelevant for basic AI research.

------
balls187
Heard this on Economist Radio.

Competition is good.

------
crb002
They are building chips without the x86 albatross. The US State Department is
to blame for the phoenix by cutting off their Intel MIC supply.

They have enough labor to do supervised learning on a grand scale that the
U.S. can't compete with.

The U.S. can't compete.

------
tabtab
That means when AI hits a wall like the "AI Winter" of the 1980's, China will
be stuck with a big bill as the bubble pops all over their faces.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Respectfully, I disagree.

I have worked in the field of AI since the early 1980s, and experienced the
'AI winter' which was a natural reaction to over-hyping of technologies like
expert systems that required too much manual effort to write and maintain.

Deep learning applications are developed with less manual effort and produce
much more value.

The 'AI world' is very different now than in the 1980s.

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sachamps
China WILL beat America as long as half of the U.S. praises FOX News and is
willing to privatize education.

------
amai
China may match or beat America in everything. (Law of big numbers)

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bitcuration
Mostly the advantage that China has, other than probably a large pool of math
educated engineers and abundant data thanks to China's aggressive
surveillance, is that things would be unethical or hard to move forwarded
under current regulation, would be much easier in China.

Ironically, underlining in this article is that acknowledgement of such often
unethical or act in doubt are perhaps essential and critical to AI's future
development. To that, China is at a clear advantage than America, and the rest
of civilized west world.

A strong economy is also necessary to propel the development, or Russia would
also be at a advantage similar to China's, or North Karea's. But only China
has the economy incentivization similar to West's.

~~~
justicezyx
Spot on.

Among all the things, this is the fundamental advantage China has over other
nations. Chinese government can do things that no other are capable.

------
throwawayecchai
Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get
into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks.

A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum
tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese
Gov. front if you look at the team.

They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types.

Till 2 days ago, it was titled SYNC 2017 - Unbounded: _Building Across
Borders_. Yesterday, it's title was changed to SYNC 2017 - _US China AI
Summit_

It is pretty clear that if they had gone with the _US China AI Summit_ in the
beginning several of their speakers may not have agreed, but now it is too
late for anyone to change mind.

 _Edited_ : To change from "Chinese" to "Chinese Gov." to clarify I'm
referring to the Chinese Gov and not Chinese people

~~~
throwawayecchai
Would love for the down voters to explain why.

~~~
scottLobster
You described Chinese people organizing and attending an open technical
conference with permission, and offer the unproven statement that several
speakers would have refused to speak if they had known just how "Chinese" it
was going to be ahead of time.

I'm not sure how those speakers couldn't just cancel, sure they'd lose any
speaking fees but I've never heard of lock-in speaking contracts for
conferences. Or if they care so much they could just modify their speeches to
not supply anything of value. Or perhaps they should have done their homework
ahead of time.

In any case I'd hardly call it a "nefarious trick" regardless of who was doing
it. I'm hesitant to throw out "racist", but you seem to be leaning that way...

~~~
maerF0x0
English language makes it hard to separate Anti-Chinese government
(Nationalism?) from Anti-Chinese people (Racism) .

I think most of these comments are referring to the former, a dislike/distrust
for the PRC government, not Chinese people.

~~~
throwawayecchai
Yes, thank you. Mea Culpa. I have updated my original comment to reflect that.

------
tmsldd
Great news for NVidia.

------
rrggrr
70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on
debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed.
Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks
have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal
stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and
Chinese A.I.

Rome burns and everyone is asleep or mad with partisan fever.

~~~
Sargos
You are just fear mongering. USA's debt to GDP ratio is not a problem for our
economy or anything else and won't be for a very long time. The US economy is
growing fast enough that the debt-to-GDP has no effect on our stability as we
could pay it off if we wanted to and do indeed have plans for this sort of
thing. Also most of our debt is actually owned by US citizens which also helps
make this a non issue. There's a reason nobody credible thinks the sky is
falling. It's not.

Helpful article: [https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-debt-to-gdp-
ratio-197...](https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-debt-to-gdp-
ratio-1978993)

~~~
rrggrr
Debt suppresses growth above 85% of GDP. At current levels it reduces net
purchasing power. It depletes tangible foreign reserves. It causes legislative
gridlock. It distorts the Federal Reserve's balance sheet.

It also doesn't sit in isolation. The BLS statistics add another 200 or so
percent for about 300% debt-to-GDP when you include household, state and muni
debt.

Unlike China, the US citizen lender argument isn't helpful. US debt holders
are free to move their money into other assets.

The only argument in favor of the current debt levels is that no other nation
can float enough liquidity to compete with US debt. For that reason alone the
sky isn't falling.

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dilemma
dang needs to do something about the rampant xenophobia that is emergent in
every thread about anything China. Unless that's the YC party line.

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microcolonel
And given happenings like the death in captivity of Liu Xiaobo, that should
scare the living hell out of you.

~~~
86go
...looks like the first prototype of 1984 will go live in China. First of all
Chinese should be worried but to my constant surprise many don't.

~~~
pavanred
Many simply don't know. For instance, Liu Xiaobo was banned from public
speaking and it was banned to publish his writing. I won't be surprised if he
was better known outside China than inside.

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onetokeoverthe
Wake up! It's ALL state owned Communism!

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for political trolling. Please don't create accounts
to break the site guidelines with.

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kyleschiller
If you're going to comment about the "Chinese takeover" please take 2 minutes
to at least read the first paragraph

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril)

'The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) is a racist color-
metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism: that the
peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western world. As a psycho-cultural
perception of menace from the East, fear of the Yellow Peril was more racial
than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of
danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous,
existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people
opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is the
white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from the Orient.[1]'

It's entirely possible that you have a valid point to make, and maybe it's
even an interesting and important one, but maybe also take a second to
consider if it might be motivated by racist tropes.

~~~
Will_Do
What a strange comment.

Why do you think this has anything to do with racism? Is anything claiming an
Asian country is doing better than a white country Yellow Peril? If not, why
is this an instance of it?

~~~
seppin
> What a strange comment.

Indeed. Textbook projection

