
A Chinese Finance Giant That’s Secretly an AI Company (2017) - astdb
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608103/ant-financial-chinas-giant-of-mobile-payments-is-rethinking-finance-with-ai/
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vadimberman
Like others mentioned, it's marketing fluff. The use of future tense and "in
the near future" already makes it clear.

And they have (drum roll) an equivalent of the FICO score! It uses "advanced
machine learning algorithms"!

There's really nothing related to privacy or societal implications, it's an
advertorial. I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology
Review.

A bigger question from me, is China really that advanced? I hold a neutral
position on this, but am now seeing a consistent pattern of articles hyping
Chinese cookie-cutter tech (or stuff which is bigger) sounding like Cold War
era Soviet propaganda. If they really had some kind of grandiose tech
achievements, why bother with this?

~~~
shanwang
I agree this one is more of a marketing fluff. But if you think all tech
advances in China are Cold War era propaganda then you have not been paying
attention to the tech world in the last 20 years.

~~~
vadimberman
I state that China advanced immensely but nowhere close to the level of the
hype now.

I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past
that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging
markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance).

But I can't name anything in China except:

* bigger supercomputers

* bigger bitcoin mining facilities

* clone cryptocurrencies

* bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu

* hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu

* proliferation of cashless payments

* excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere

* I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully

Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a
decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a
functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" \- nowhere
close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit
goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American
corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech.

Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed
elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be
sincerely interested to learn of such.

~~~
pasabagi
I don't know if China's advanced, but I do know if you're making electronics,
you want to be in China. Everything I order comes with about a month lead-time
from Shanghai. They've also started making some really good electronics. Rapid
prototyping is really important, and I think becoming more important all the
time, since robotics is becoming both cheaper and better.

I haven't heard of anything 'pure tech', but there's a big network effect to
having the world's electronics industry on your doorstep. If you're building a
microscope, you don't have to wait for months for the parts to arrive. If
you're building a new kind of centrifuge, you have a massive pool of great
engineers who can do it for you, just a phonecall away.

------
dis-sys
The article is nothing else but a huge load of cheap marketing material. If
they do have such AI expertise, how about just apply such skills to find out
all those fake craps flooding taobao.com owned by the same group?

Look at Ant Financial's credit score system known as the sesame score, it is
just a huge disaster and embarrassment to the company. Last year, Ant
Financial openly promoted the idea to let high sesame score users to
exclusively date young college girls, you will only be allowed to
contact/interact with those college girls if your sesame score is higher than
750. You have to question the overall integrity of the company and the team
behind such ideas.

At the beginning of 2018, users received notification from Ant Financial for
viewing their 2017 yearly bill. Ant Financial forced all users who want to
view that yearly bill to disclose their sesame score potentially to the rest
part of the Alibaba group.

No one from the top management team stepped down after the above two
incidents, even when both of them hit national headline. Why? Because uncle
Jack Ma's Ant Financial doesn't give a crap on such "tiny" incidents.

With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for
handling my personal data and finance. Luckily, there are other far better &
more innovative Chinese competitors kicking Ant Financial's ass right now,
e.g. Tencent.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> ...you will only be allowed to contact/interact with those college girls if
> your sesame score is higher than 750. You have to question the overall
> integrity of the company and the team behind such ideas.

> With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for
> handling my personal data and finance.

China is not America, they value societal stability over personal freedom.
It's absolutely fine that you wouldn't trust this institution, but it's not
made for you.

~~~
yorwba
You can still choose which companies you interact with. That doesn't prevent
the government from getting your data, but it does mean that those companies
won't be able to use it for their own gain.

And I'm pretty sure the grandparent is well aware of the political situation
in China, just take a look at their comment history.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> You can still choose which companies you interact with.

Right, which is my point. They won't mind something like limiting access to
college women to those with good scores like America would, so they won't take
their money elsewhere. Their different culture causes companies to behave
differently than they would in the US.

~~~
yorwba
I just spent a bit of time researching the incident, since I don't really
follow Chinese social media that closely, and found a Zhihu (Chinese Quora)
question that was quite informative:
[https://www.zhihu.com/question/52987944](https://www.zhihu.com/question/52987944)

Some people definitely did mind, since the social dynamics caused lots "pretty
women" posting selfies (not all of themselves) to ask those men with scores >
750 for money and/or attention. Someone punned the Chinese name for Alipay
(支付宝, zhifubao) into "pay the pimp" (支付鸨, pronounced identically), which might
give you an idea how someone who culturally values social stability might come
to reject such a company. As far as I can tell, the feature was then scrapped
pretty quickly.

~~~
dis-sys
you forgot to mention something important here - the "feature" is designed,
implemented and promoted by Ant Financial's Alipay, yet no one took
responsibility for it, no one got fired/demoted. it is a huge contrast to
their own moon cake incident 1.5 years ago in which developers who used
automated scripts to boost their chances of purchasing moon cakes sold by the
company at favourable prices got fired on the spot for violating company
policies.

the message is clear here - you are encouraged to violate laws to try
maximizing company revenue but you must stick to company policies.

it is a social risk to allow companies like this to master AI techniques.

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erikb
Well, let's separate between the marketing fluff and the actual value.
Currently it's doing with AI what everybody else does: using more data to make
more detailed predictions about numbered data (in this case money). That in
itself is already great.

If they achieve to recognize the car in a given picture, and maybe even the
type of car, even though it's damaged, that will be really great. With that
they may be better than the current best solution I've seen (FB's object
recognition, which may not even be on as high a level as they present to us in
a blog post). But estimating the damage, means recognizing something that is
not a pattern. I doubt even classifying this into three categories like
`~100bucks`, `~2000bucks`, `buynewone` would already be hard. I doubt that
anybody could do it.

And here's the point: Yes, Chinese IT companies are picking up speed. And I
wish them all the success. But they have yet to show something that is really
innovated by them. This idea is great, but they need to prove that they can do
it before I will clap for their achievements.

~~~
negamax
Who are you to clap for their achievements? There's a story about China's leap
in science at the top. Maybe you should read it. Tunnel visions and echo
chambers helps noone.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
That story talks about how china is pouring money into science to get to the
top, it doesn’t actually talk about them already being there, the very
opposite of tunnel vision.

------
geeeek
I have a good credit record on Ant, and I just come USA last Fall, really feel
the inconvenient payment here, I personality don't trust any third party
financial institutions, whether physical bank or online financial company, and
some behaviors the ant performed on its customers, I cant agree.

Well one fact I can tell about is the expo in my university before I came to
USA, the AI technology shows during the expo suprised me, although the
mechanism behind problem simple, well in China senario, the nlp, characters
recognition is more difficult due to it's culture.

I happened to check out it's individual loans oneline, based its credit
system, everyone has a credit number, I can lend my money to thers, it's like
customer to customer, it's more like the blockchain idea (decentralize), I
like it, we don't need bank or anything other agents to operate for us,
although the credit number can be compromied by Ant, the idea is real, and
used by Chinese people, it's happening, it's a start.

I know here is a different country, different system, basically payment
dominated by cash and credit card, which I was really not used to, no offense,
living here I feel more traditional regarding payment and shopping.

Of course there are so many things good and better than China, but China is so
big, there are technologies advanced indeed. Back to Ant, there are certain
ways they promote their products I don't like, the truth is they do innovate
Chinese shopping, loans and financial payments, and mostly it's working well,
it's more align to the society develop.

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vorg
> Ant uses advanced machine-learning algorithms and custom programmable chips
> to crunch huge quantities of user data in a few seconds, to determine
> whether to grant a customer a loan

Is this legal in the U.S. and E.U.? These AI systems can increase profits by
saying _who_ should get loans, but not _why_ they should. If a U.S. business
can't give clear criteria on how it decides on whether or not to grant loans,
and instead allows an AI to decide based on any possible unknown criteria
which could include ethnic profiling, then wouldn't they get sued soon enough?

~~~
Amygaz
Totally legal. There is even blog/advertising for it:
[https://www.techemergence.com/artificial-intelligence-
applic...](https://www.techemergence.com/artificial-intelligence-applications-
lending-loan-management/)

~~~
jsemrau
The information they collect is not available for credit scoring anywhere else
but China. While many services exist that offer "social scoring" or a
combination thereof (Fico XD score), none of them rank well and offer loan
approvals outside a few hundred dollars in working capital loans.

