
Deciphering China’s AI Dream - hunglee2
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/
======
nabla9
History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.

Strong rhymes from the 80's and 90's when Japan was the boogieman. Replace
Japan with China to update into the present moment.

1) Fear of Japanese AI was real in the 80's. The fifth generation computers
(massive parallelism with prolog programs)[1].

2) Fear of Japanese buying the rest of the world [2] and unfair trade tactics.

3) Trump attacking Japan for trade and considering a presidential run with
trade war and tariffs [3].

4) The war with Japan is inevitable [4].

5) Under all this Japan had 'demographic time bomb' and real estate boom
reaching the maximum.

China will undoubtedly face many of the same problems as Japan did, but the
scales are different (both time and magnitude). China has still at least two
decades to go. The country is still undergoing urbanization and has to fit
over 100 million people into cities. While Chinese growth can't be as high as
in last decades, their growth will still outpace the West for a long time.

It's very unlikely that China just fizzles and stays paralyzed for more than a
decade like Japan did. Either Chinese solve their problems or the problems
will destabilize China internally.

\---

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

[2]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-
buyin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-
spree-2014-9)

[3]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-
tr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-trumps-one-
solid-stance-a-hard-line-on-
trade/2018/03/07/4b1ed250-2172-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html?utm_term=.591792e550ca)

[4]: The Coming War With Japan by George Friedman , Meredith Lebard
[https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-
Friedman/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-
Friedman/dp/0312058365)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It would be ironic if the fourth AI winter came about because China over
invested in AI. China's real estate boom has already hit peak Japan.

~~~
nabla9
I'm certain that AI business will plateau and there will be yet another AI
winter without new big breakthroughs in fundamental research.

We are currently living in a era where the results from Hinton & Canadian
Mafia are still begin adopted and refined. It's just alternating layers of
affine transformations and nonlinearity with lots of tricks and improved
routing.

There needs to be fundamental theoretical breakthrough in every decade or so,
and not just refinements and new applications. Hinton made his "What is wrong
with convolutional neural nets" speech years ago
"[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE)
I believe that Hinton's capsule networks type attempts are what we need more.
They may not deliver immediately impressive results because fundamental
research involves lots of setbacks.

~~~
vinn124
> It's just alternating layers of affine transformations and nonlinearity with
> lots of tricks and improved routing.

and a computation is just 0s and 1s, with lots of if/then statements.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
Not necessarily. Lambda calculus is Turing-complete under Church-Turing
thesis, and it has nothing to do with 0s and 1s. That’s just von-Neumann
architecture encoding.

~~~
vinn124
youve missed the point.

the point is: anything complex can be dismissed as "just x,y,z" if you dont
appreciate the massive body of work behind it.

i made that point because OP observed that "ml is just affine transformations"
or something to that effect. yes, that's one way to frame it - if youre okay
overlooking roughly 30 years of research.

------
clvcooke
Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my,
perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese
style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this
field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is
highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking
and creativity.

The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was
necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see
incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe
I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China
will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal
experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small
corner of applied science tells me otherwise.

Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people
further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).

Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity
within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe
that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond
mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the
mathematical understanding to build something novel.

~~~
dlwdlw
Having gone to school in China I think that the Chinese people not being
creative is incorrect. The public US education system is just worse all
around. However there are pockets of extremely high quality that exist but
aren't indicative of the US as a whole.

What is an advantage however is the US culture which promotes a certain type
of courage. In degenerate cases it combines with bad education to become a
naive form of arrogance and self indulgance. In the most actualized forms it
combines with strong work ethic and refusal to look away from reality to
create very big change. (ironically this freedom culture combines best with
immigrant mentality)

The Chinese are very creative, except this creativity is often expressed in
trivial ways because the culture creates a sense of "fineness" with things.
The US culturally has what the Chinese refer to as "the heroe's dream" where
everyone imagines themselves the hero. I suspect Chinas large population as
well as it's more authoritarian government plays a role. Historically pre-
communist era even the "important" things were left to the imperial elite.

~~~
randcraw
My doubt is that Chinese businesses will be able to produce competitive
products that break new ground with markets outside China.

In a political culture that largely will prevent outsiders from participating
in business or non-tech academia _inside_ the country (who will want to
live/teach inside China, micromanaged by Big Brother's social score — other
than the Chinese?), I think China's heavyhanded political leadership of the
future will form an insurmountable obstacle against the country's ability to
compete in any/all of tomorrow's critical revolutionary exponential multiplier
business spaces — the ones that silicon valley startups excel at, that require
dynamic multicultural madhouse environs, and that engender future Googles or
Apples. Without the freedom and chaos needed for this space to thrive, China
will forever relegate its rising business geniuses to pursue mere
optimizations of The Next Big Thing, that will be invented where new ideas are
free to run amok.

In the not so distant future, China's cut-rate factories distributors and
e-tailers will be automated, like everyone else's, and her political
stranglehold on the genesis of new ideas will lead to her uncompetitive
downfall. That is, if a billion unemployed don't do it first.

~~~
sangnoir
> My doubt is that Chinese businesses will be able to produce competitive
> products that break new ground with markets outside China.

Thanks to capitalism - they can just buy makers of competitive products. Have
you looked at the 2018 Volvo lineup? I think they are fantastic cars.

------
nopinsight
This is news to me. Will it likely affect Nvidia in any significant way?

From p.18 of the report:

"What is new in the hardware driver is that Chinese tech giants and unicorn
startups are competitive with some of the world’s leading companies in
designing AI chips. For instance, Chinese company Cambricon, a statebacked
startup valued at $1 billion, has developed chips that are six times faster
than the standard GPUs for deep learning applications and use a fraction of
the power consumption.65 Moreover, equipped with a new “neural processing
unit,” Huawei has arguably overtaken Apple in mobile AI chips.66"

~~~
Nokinside
Nvidia will face more competition in the future, but it has technological
edge.

So far Nvidia has build microarchitectures that are generic. They just put
tensor cores, F64, F32, F16 units and 8-bit inference support into the same
GPU. They are used in HPC, graphics, DL inference and training. That's four
different domains.

I suspect that in the future Nvidia builds 2-3 different microarchitectures.

One for HPC + graphics.

One for DL training.

One for DL inference.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Right, I wonder just how specialized these chips are. There are still changes
in modeling and architecture coming hot off the research presses. It's easy-
ish to hard code a specific architecture in your Verilog and claim massive
efficiency improvements. While AI is still very much in the research stage,
general-purpose is what really matters.

------
astebbin
Not loading for me. Cached on the Wayback Machine:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-
chinas-ai-dream/)

EDIT: Hrm, guess it only cached the abstract.

~~~
polar
The Wayback Machine doesn't appear to have the PDF, but the direct link worked
for me:

[https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-
content/uploads/Deciphering_Chin...](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-
content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf)

Mirror: [https://archive.fo/QhRnC](https://archive.fo/QhRnC)

~~~
kercker
I uploaded the PDF into Dropbox, and shared the file at the following link:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-
Dream.pdf?dl=0)

------
EGreg
Here is what I am worried about: as China takes more and more steps to become
authoritarian -- CCTV cameras everywhere and recently banning people from
trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough -- aren't they a
few steps away from ushering in an AI-overseen human population, tracking
everyone's actions and gradually increasing the amount of control over the
population until there is nothing anyone can do, including the politicians?
There MAY be one or more humans at the top, but it might just be completely
run by itself in the end. My worry is that it might have some serious problems
from the AI not understanding human needs.

As one AI researcher said, the temptation to try it just too _sweet_. And
China's motto of already "once untrustworthy, always restricted" for the
social credit score system isn't very encouraging.

~~~
fspeech
"banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high
enough"

This is a myth created by inaccurate reporting. For details on what the policy
is exactly see my earlier comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551)

------
osrec
Wow, the entire fhi.ox.ac.uk subdomain is unreachable. I thought Oxford uni
servers would have been able to cope with a little traffic surge!

~~~
Rattled
I hope it is just a traffic surge, not a great cannon.

------
vadimberman
> _By 2020, China’s AI industry will be “in line” with the most advanced
> countries, with a core AI industry gross output exceeding RMB 150 billion
> (USD 22.5 billion) and AI-related industry gross output exceeding RMB 1
> trillion (USD 150.8 billion)_

And I'm confident the goal will be reached. Incidentally, much of the software
that today is classified as "just software" will be called "AI".

Not that it's different from elsewhere, of course (I saw screenscraping being
called "AI"), it's just there are government incentives to do so.

------
John_KZ
The most worrying trend I note is how closely China and the West are when it
comes to the use of AI and data collection for the manipulation and control of
the masses.

The financial system is different. In the West, there's no central authority
requesting what needs to be done, but small and big companies are allowed to
go crazy with user data, as long as they provide access to government agencies
too. In China, the whole thing is managed by governmental entities, but it
functions strikingly similar. The Chinese also lack a lot of the tact and PR
management that western companies are so good at - but the differences aren't
that big in the surveilance. One other key difference is that the Chinese
aren't afraid to prosecute people based on that data, while in the West we
still have some due process, but the future plans aren't looking good.

