
Google to open artificial intelligence centre in China - aaron_p
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42334583
======
opportune
Perhaps this is because I don't have the hard facts and figures right in front
of me, but I have a hard time believing that foreign tech investments in China
really pay off. The Chinese strategy seems to be to woo big foreign companies,
build a critical mass of local users who want the product, ban or otherwise
limit the foreign company's influence in China, then develop a home-grown
Chinese version of the foreign company's product with state support and the
newly acquired domestic talent.

If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't
China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company?
Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?

~~~
kercker
An AI center is not a product like a search engine or Windows, or an
e-commerce site.

It helps China cultivate talents, why would China limit its influence.

MSRA accomplishes many things worthwhile such as ResNet in China, and it
prospers now. Some researchers enter MSRA, and some leave. They enter or leave
not because the government force them to do so, they enter or leave because
they can tell where opportunity resides.

~~~
opportune
I'm not asking why China would limit it, I'm asking what Google _gains_ from
it.

If Google's top talent in China will mostly be poached within the next 10
years, is it really worthwhile to open a research center there? MSRA is a very
good example, but at the end of the day, it's still a training ground for
Chinese researchers. Paradoxically, the more important it is that Chinese
researchers work on at Google China, the more likely that Google is to lose
those researchers to government or private competitors.

~~~
LostInTheWoods2
On one hand, I have to agree that China's closed/censored society is directly
at odds with the product offering of a company like Google ... on the other
hand, does one simply disengage from such a massive market as China? Perhaps
Google is betting on a future when there is greater freedom for the Chinese
people.

~~~
opportune
I personally think Google's best approach would be to pay hand-over-fist for
the best Chinese AI/ML experts to emigrate to the US and do their work here.
However, Google seems to be taking the shotgun approach of employing more
experts in the short-term while guaranteeing them less job stability in the
long-term.

I think you're right in that it really does depend on when China becomes a
free society. Personally, from what/who I know from China, I don't see this
happening within the next decade. I expect political instability within China
to reach a tipping point, after which we'll either see a very slow global
liberalization or a definitive move towards a more totalitarian Chinese
government with a modern twist.

Honestly I don't know why Google has any faith in the good will of the future
Chinese government. As has been established for a very long time, China needs
foreign expertise more than any foreign company needs a labor or consumer
market within China.

------
devy
A lot of people still are questioning the motion. But it's fair and simple:
Google needs to tap local Chinese AI talents. Their size is grow so large that
it can't be ignore. And you don't have to read it between the lines, it's
front and center on the Google's official blog post[1], stated by Google Chief
Scientist for AI/ML Feifei Li:

    
    
         China is home to many of the world's top experts in artificial intelligence (AI) 
         and machine learning. All three winning teams of the ImageNet Challenge 
         in the past three years have been largely composed of Chinese researchers. 
         Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015 
         and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that 
         their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled.
    

[1]: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai-
china-c...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai-china-
center/)

------
whooshee
Didn't expect a simple job offering would bring all these political arguments
and speculation from people hardly read any Chinese or understand Chinese
history & economics. smh. It's just business, China has a strong STEM talent
pool, and Google can easily select them from top in top at a competitive
price.

~~~
setecgastronomy
Every HN thread about china has the exact same anti-chinese comments. Every
single one.

------
PeterStuer
Please understand that we are still in the midst of a 'war for talent' as far
as AI is concerned. Since getting them to the US is less likely, Google is
just moving to where the talent is.

~~~
tanilama
True. It is a pretty strong endorsement from Google to setup a specific
research division in a country where they effectively get banned. The only
logical reason is to hire talents at local price for projects outside of
China. Not sure how the return would be though.

------
dis-sys
When google initially entered the Chinese market more than a decade ago, it
offered a censored version of google search conformed to the censorship
requirements set by the Chinese government. It argued that the most ethical
option was to offer some restricted services to Chinese rather than leave
hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users with limited access to
information [1]. Basically it argued that Chinese need google (and other
American internet companies) to avoid being left behind in the Internet age.

Interestingly, 7 years after its quit from the Chinese market, the Internet
sector in China is booming with 4 out of world's top 10 Internet companies
being Chinese companies [2]. Now they are setting up this AI centre, surely
that is to help Chinese avoid being left behind in the AI age again.

We will see. ;)

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-g...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-
google-quit-china-and-why-its-heading-back/424482/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies)

~~~
vatueil
Google.cn _was_ better than the alternatives, since it at least disclosed when
search results had to be censored (sorta like the notices when links are
removed due to copyright takedowns). Of course the CPC didn't like that, and
it was probably one of the things which ultimately led to Google leaving/being
driven out of China.

It would have been much more profitable to simply comply rather than lose the
Chinese market, as numerous other Western companies have done.

------
vonnik
An under-reported fact is that Google has done more than any other country to
help spread the use of AI in China. AlphaGo was a Sputnik moment that
galvanized the government, which threw its weight behind AI a few months
later. TensorFlow is widely used and Google is paying evangelists to tour the
country, giving speeches and writing books about its use. This hiring center
is just one piece of a larger strategy for them to ensure that TensorFlow wins
the API wars in machine learning.

------
Top19
Please HN don’t censor this comment. I legitimately believe that the US and
China are on the road to war, and this war will draw on in all the powers of
the world.

This comment might be mocked, but if you read into history you can see how
unbelievable war seemed within weeks of a conflict. The day WWI broke out the
French and German ambassador were trying out each other’s cars and drinking
wine in Alsace.

This research center is a bad idea. It’s like if the University of Chicago and
Enrico Fermi decided to establish their atomic research lab in Munich in the
1930’s.

Don’t see this as an anti-Chinese comment, if anything the fault lies with
Americans who abused, overused, and failed to adjust an international
trade/monetary system. The fact that our government is now run by no one who
served in or remembered World War II / The Great Depression seems a likely
cause of how we went down this path.

If you’re curious for more on this, look into how close the US came to war
with China in 1995 in Taiwan. Also look up the RAND Corporation’s study on war
with China from 2015.

~~~
Cthulhu_
How many wars were started over tensions concerning research centers /
science? WW1 was started by an assassination, WW2 by an aggressive annexation
of countries and race-based extermination.

If China and the US go to war, it'll probably be over aggression in North
Korea; not over a corporately funded scientific research center.

~~~
dontreact
The parent comment is not claiming that war will start because of a research
lab. (S)he is saying it is against the interest of the US to start an AI lab
there because AI will be critical to the war effort if there is war.

~~~
kercker
Maybe that Google sets up an AI lab is not in the interest of the US, but it
is in the interest of Google.

Google is a multinational company and its employees come from diverse
countries. Although it is headquartered in the US and its founders are
American citizens, its core interests may not fully align with the core
interests of the US.

------
c128
this will be an extremely good fit, china and google. Their ideologies for the
most part are the same.

------
mtgx
When we'll look back 20 years from now, we'll we see Google in the same light
as we did IBM after helping the Nazi with their computers?

Will Google allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese
citizens and dissidents?

~~~
kercker
I find your argument rather lame.

First, Chinese government is not Nazi and Google is not IBM. You can't just
say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government.

Second, even if Google openly broke with Chinese government, it still has
offices in China. I doubt that Google opens an AI center in China to "allow
its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents",
and I do think that Google has a big ambition than you can think in China. And
I think that ambition is to advance AI with the help of local talents.

~~~
opportune
At its core, the goal of the two regimes (China, Nazi Germany) is the same:
control information so that the existing regime is portrayed in a good light
that preserves stability. Just because China isn't genocoding Jews doesn't
mean they don't have hundreds of thousands of political prisoners,
disadvantaged minorities, and a completely authoritarian government. As is,
you would never hear of the North Korean concentration camps that China
supports, nor the Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing.

Google's move is purely financial. Google's biggest ambition is to control
Chinese search, but its greatest ambition is to control _all_ search, and the
internet as whole. Google, as all other appreciably large tech companies,
wants to hold a dominant position in the Chinse market, and to do so is
willing to sacrifice market share in inferuor products. How much China gets
involved is TB.

The really fun part? Watching corporate entities justify genocide, sexism,
racism, etc. in their grabs for dominance over the remaining European
provinces.

~~~
kercker
Can you give some credible sources on "Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are
ongoing"?

~~~
opportune
Tibet: [https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-
conflict-...](https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-
resolution-and-human-rights/tibet)

>"The Tibetan government in exile in India estimates that the death toll since
1950 due to starvation, outright violence, and other indirect causes amounts
to 1.2 million. However, some Tibetologists place the figure closer to half a
million. The non-governmental International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)
released a report to the United Nations in 1959, and another in 1960, which
documented accounts of atrocities and accused the Chinese of religious-based
genocide in Tibet. "

Could possibly be biased by CIA it says.

Uighur: [https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-
xinjiang...](https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang-
east-turkestan)

Ehh this is as biased as it probably gets and it doesn't really make it sound
like genocide. I guess I had heard of this (and maybe Tibet too) as cultural
genocides before, and got it mixed up.

------
equalunique
Did anyone else here grow up being told that the Chinese government stole
search technology from Google when they tried to do business there, and this
is how Baidu got started?

~~~
kercker
Once www.people.cn (the website of People's Daily) built a search engine and
failed. If Chinese government stole search technology from Google, why would
it give it to Baidu not to a search engine set up by its mouthpiece?

Baidu had already been popular in China before Google officially entered
China, so there is no 'this is how Baidu got started' thing.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
No idea if they stole anything and I wouldn't/couldn't/won't make any claims
about that etc. but what I've seen of Baidu's open sourced offerings, they are
based on Google's publically promoted/published designs down to the types of
components (their own implementations of protobuf RPC, GFS, etc.), class
names, API C++ style, etc.

Lots of others have done this (some parts of Facebook, too) and I don't think
this was based on Google source code or anything, but it doesn't exactly smell
terribly innovative on its own?

------
reacweb
Since the beginning, Google has claimed it was an AI company. They have killed
their mantra "do no evil" and now they are putting labs in a country with
lower values of ethic. Recently they were selling their robotic activity
because it was too frightening. All their actions are consistent with a single
aim: build an AI like in singularity or terminator.

~~~
kercker
Maybe you should not use anything Made in China, 'a country with lower values
of ethic', because anything Made in China you consumed contribute to the
economy of the China.

If you continue to use made in China, your criticizing Google setting up an AI
lab in China is just hypocrisy.

~~~
reacweb
I did not expect my comment to be interpreted as a critic of China. I have
nothing against Chinese people and I am glad that Google setting in China will
help the country to develop.

