
China’s SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, closes $620M round - alex_young
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/30/even-more-money-for-senstime-ai-china/
======
throwawayMA
While this article notes that the Chinese government is one of Sensetime's
most visible partners, it doesn't really make it clear the extent to which
private sector companies like SenseTime are inseparable from the public sector
in China. By supporting SenseTime as its client, Beijing has signaled to
investors like Alibaba that it has chosen a winner, and that it will never let
SenseTime fail. As with most mainland tech companies, SenseTime will heed the
diktats of the central government, much as social platforms like Weibo march
in step on censorship requests.

One interesting question this raises is: How can non-Chinese compete against
such national champions, this intense cooperation between public and private
sectors? In the US, those relationships are much more problematic, as the
recent uproar at Google about Project Maven illustrates. Not only that, but
the US government is neither as aggressive nor as forward-looking about such
partnerships, preferring to let market forces have their way. China is tilting
the playing field in its favor, while the world's sole superpower is hobbled
by clowns and criminals in the executive branch, and corrupt prime contractors
pretend to supply the government with tech that they neither understand nor
make themselves.

~~~
siruncledrew
When other countries get brought up, if it doesn't relate to something the US
is a leader in, half the time the subject just gets undermined or discredited
somehow. Not just China, but even with other Asian/African/European/South
American countries. There's some mentality of there's America, and then
there's everyone else in the world. I'm sure not everyone has this view, but
it comes off as pretty damn self-righteous. It seems like global matters are
treated with a double-standard where negatives about America get treated with
"C'est la vie", but then other countries people haven't even visited get
judged like some "lesser-than".

For example, coming back to the US from studying in Germany, people asked what
the conditions were like and it was pretty interesting there was this
imagination of migrants running wild, riots in the streets, like it was 1939
again when in reality things were pretty much the same. Unsurprisingly, I'm
sure the US media doesn't help with their approach to sensationalism.

~~~
dtwest
What specific negatives about America get 'treated with "C'est la vie"'?
Americans and the American media are extremely self critical.

To counter your anecdote, when I talk to many Europeans there is this
imagination that American cities now have gun-wielding criminals "running
wild, riots in the streets" when in reality things "were pretty much the
same".

People who don't know much about places outside their home often fall victim
to sensationalist media. And Americans tend to be very inward focused so they
are vulnerable to this. However, to say Americans ignore their own problems is
blatantly false.

~~~
Treegarden
Are you kidding me? Don't get me wrong I love america for being the epicenter
of western culture and its innovation - I even plan on living there for some
years. I feel alienated by my own German culture with its weird lederhosen,
mozart and the general sentiment for illiteracy regarding all things digital.

As far as I know americans think "God" created (or blessed or whatever) their
holy country and its the greatest nation on earth. There is the classic
american patriotism. The pledge of honor (and that kneeling thing??). Almost
half of americans (or at least a very large Marjory) are creationist and
believe angels are real. Even some of your presidents do. There are actual
fights weither or not evolution should be taught in schools. Your relationship
with Religion is also borderline pathological. There are studies that show
higher developed countries tend to have atheist or at least agnostic leanings
but the US is an outlier here.

Your irrational war on drugs is a disaster, it, together with your racist
history of slavery and segregation causes your cultural critical problems with
your minority communities. Your police acts like there in a war zone. Your
media is a shit show of of people throwing mud at each other. If you ever
learn german you should watch the Tagesthemen which is the most unbiased and
informative news I have ever seen in my life. Alternately I think french24
comes close though I'm not sure.

Your relationship with guns is a whole other story as your own students can
attest. I can understand the attraction to guns but Jesus you behave like an
alcohol addict saying its only medicine.

Some other worthy mentions are your commercial prison system that gives you
the highest incarceration rate worldwide. I also heard many times your
Judaical system highly disfavors the financially weak but I don't know much
about that topic. You also have a "fat" epidemic as I have heard. Also your
education system is kinda bad and too expensive.

To close it off - your politics are highly polarized with borderline retarded
conservatives that call everyone soyboys on the one side and don't even get me
started on the social justice warriors that took a University president
hostage[1] and in general know nothing else but to scream loudly.

Cooperation oligopolies are gaining too much control and you see anything
remotely welfare related such as the obama health care or free universities as
communism.

Btw. education is gonna be the most important field in the future. With rising
demand for high skilled jobs poor people are not gonna have it easy. So free
universities aren't that bad of an idea (and yes obviously they are not free
but paid for by the tax payer).

Also german A-Level History Lessons are of extremely high qualities so we know
all about our past and what lessons that brings with it. One of the most
important skill I learned in School was in History where we learned to
critically analyse any kind of source. It kinda makes you immune to bullshit
media of all sorts.

EDIT: I didn't read the source, it was simply the first google match and I
just put it there for reference.

1 [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-26/they-believe-i-
was...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-26/they-believe-i-was-being-
sought-police-tell-professor-avoid-campus-protesters-seek-h)

~~~
gnarcoregrizz
You say you're immune to bullshit media, yet you link zerohedge, and your
entire view of things here (at least culturally) seems to be based off of
sensationalist media and things said on reddit etc. I've never heard the term
'soyboy' in real life, most religious people are pretty nice, in fact most
people aren't even religious to begin with, most conservatives are reasonable,
99.99% of gun owners are responsible.

I think you're wrong about America's 'relationship with religion' being
pathological. In fact, Utah (the most religious state probably, and pretty
advanced) has almost no homelessness. Contrast that with the most
liberal/atheist states and it's pretty much the opposite. So, the church can
play a positive role. That said, religion isn't actually relevant in many
parts of modern US society.

As for guns, I think its a mental health epidemic with a bunch of columbine
copycats, rather than a strictly gun issue. I could say that Europe has bad
relationship with trucks.

The war on drugs is a disaster yes. The prison system is a disaster. The fat
epidemic is a disaster (I blame corn syrup aka corn subsidies and car
culture), but there are some pretty dang fat people in Europe too. Education
quality depends on the state, but the northeast (MA, CT, NJ) has some great
public schools. The political divide is a disaster. Healthcare "policy" is a
disaster.

The US is so large and diverse that states act more like european countries,
each with their own stereotypes and policies. For example, gun culture is non-
existant in the northeast, yet in the west and south it is very prevalent. I
mean, in NYC carrying even a folding knife is illegal, yet you're probably
considered weird if you don't have one on you at all times in other parts of
the country. In the EU, you have Greece and Switzerland, but they couldn't be
more far apart culturally and even financially.

Europe does a lot of things better than the US, especially with infrastructure
(new infrastructure - our old infrastructure is awesome we just haven't been
investing in it for the last 30 years due to the small government conservitard
meme). Overall QOL is probably higher.

As for what you do worse, a lot of EU states are nanny states with very high
taxes. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of upward mobility. Salaries are
low, but there is still inequality. You don't pioneer much.

~~~
lostcolony
Just as a fun aside, the 'housing first' model that UTah adopted...was done
first by LA and NY back in the late 80s/early 90s.

Also, Utah has plenty of homeless. What they've reduced (to 1/10th of what it
was) is -chronic- homelessness. They still have 14k people per year spending
one or more nights in an emergency shelter each year (
[https://jobs.utah.gov/housing/scso/documents/homelessness201...](https://jobs.utah.gov/housing/scso/documents/homelessness2017.pdf)
, page #35), which is essentially unchanged since before the 'housing first'
model was adopted.

What is especially interesting is that due to the inter-state
differences...raw homeless numbers aren't really that telling. That is, places
that are friendly to the homeless tend to have more homeless. Which...makes
sense. Even Utah despite its housing policy, is not considered particularly
friendly to homeless people, and there is some evidence that people leave the
state when homeless ( [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/salt-
lake-ci...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/salt-lake-city-
homeless-people-missing) ).

I basically mention this to point out that UTah isn't quite the shining beacon
on how to 'solve' the homeless situation as they were touted a few years
ago..and that at best their religiosity is irrelevant to that.

------
alex_young
This tech enables the Chinese social credit system. Pretty dark use for AI
IMHO.

~~~
collinf
Wow, for anyone who hasn't read into this, check out the Wikipedia page[1].
Feels like sci-fi dystopian futures are closer everyday.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)

~~~
Retric
I think we are already in a Dystonian future and people are distracted and
don't notice.

Vast prison population and byzantine court system, Declining life expectancy,
Horrific traffic, Surveillance state including 24/7 location tracking, Births
below replacement rate, Systemic Unemployment and Age Discrimination, etc

Individually they don't seem bad until one of them bites you. But, the world
is a very nasty place for many people.

~~~
nimmer
> Births below replacement rate

This is the opposite of a problem. Overpopulation is a huge global issue.

> Vast prison population and byzantine court system > Systemic Unemployment
> and Age Discrimination

You forgot discrimination based on ethnicity, nationality and, most notably,
wealth.

~~~
kazinator
Birth below replacement rate being a problem is usually in the context of the
problem of " _us_ dwindling versus _them_ proliferating".

~~~
Retric
_Every_ large ethnic group is at least slightly below replacement rate in the
USA. Some more than others but it's not a good sign suggesting that people are
generally struggling.

PS: Male:Female gender imbalance at birth + early deaths is why the
replacement rate is over 2.0 lifetime births per woman.

------
djhworld
Off topic, but just looking through TechCrunchs GDPR options, they list at
least 50 'advertising partners' who they work with to personalise your ads.

I don't work for a company who runs sites like these, but is that normal? How
do you maintain a relationship with 50 different ad vendors, or do they
actually just deal with 2-3 and then there's a whole graph of others on some
sort of affiliate scheme?

~~~
lunaroyster
I imagine that's what you would get with a competitive marketing team, where
everyone would handle one or more of those relationships.

------
vonnik
Powered by Caffe, an open-source framework developed at Berkeley. The irony.

~~~
p1esk
Developed at Berkeley by Yangqing Jia, a Chinese national.

~~~
vonnik
A Chinese national whose project was backed with US public funds. Triple
irony.

~~~
est
A large portion of US inventions were made by people of different nationals, I
don't see the irony here but only narrow-mindedness.

~~~
vonnik
I'm not objecting to foreign nationals doing publicly funded research in the
US. And I was not the first to bring up his nationality. Personally, I don't
care what his nationality is. The initial irony I noted was that a US
university had produced an open source project that is the chief tool of face
detection on the mainland.

------
jpeg_hero
With this much money, surely things will end well and this money with be used
prudently to advance their future.

~~~
thosakwe
You forgot the “/s”

------
Willson50
I don't think we can say the AI Winter is here until these large funding
rounds stop.

~~~
roymurdock
From the author of the AI Winter post:

"I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on
AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these
don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet
against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does
today, interest will die very, very quickly."

~~~
alex_young
This possibility is interesting to consider from an economic perspective.

Let's posit that DL does just that, bring in the same value (as a whole
system) as non-DL.

Inside such a system, there is a business advantage to implementation of DL,
and there is a concentration of value around those with the largest dataset.

This means that DL systems will still be very valuable in that they are a
competitive advantage, but only so much as they are difficult to implement
independently.

The value differentiator then becomes the data itself. I think this points to
a value proposition for data providers. GDPR and such seem to be quite
correctly identifying and correcting for this risk.

------
mindfulhack
More data (the copious amounts of data China is gathering on its people)
doesn't itself make AI technology better - or does it, theoretically? Or put
it this way: I'm assuming the real revolution in AI will be from talented-ass
scientists and algorithms, not just from the amount of data you throw at
computers.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
A lot of the algorithms center around enabling the training of more data (e.g.
one bit DAC for distributes GPU training).

------
baybal2
My comment on SenseTime

It is a unicorn of few billion bucks without a SINGLE THING that makes money.

They have an "AI" supposedly, but that thing does not make money magically
appear in their pocket.

At best, they market a face recognition library, that sucks in comparison to a
first grader's OpenCV hello world.

------
auganov
AI might be one of the few tech niches where China has a legitimate advantage.
Obtaining certain kinds of data is tough, there are many unresolved ethical
and legal considerations. The communist regime has already proven itself to
have no moral qualms about the most abhorrent acts like organ harvesting from
political prisoners. Rule of law is not a problem either. The regime has also
displayed great interest and belief in AI. Whatever the companies want they're
gonna get.

------
matachuan
skynet in action

