Technology

NYT

Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?点击查看本文中文版

By PAUL MOZUR and JOHN MARKOFFMAY 27, 2017

Sören Schwertfeger at ShanghaiTech University, where a sizable grant has allowed him to set up an artificial intelligence lab. Credit Tim Franco for The New York Times

HONG KONG — Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established.

Instead, he went to China.

“You couldn’t have started a lab like mine elsewhere,” Mr. Schwertfeger said.

The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West invented the software and the chips powering today’s digital age, has become a major player in artificial intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future. Experts widely believe China is only a step behind the United States.

China’s ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell. There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country’s ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor the internet.

Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China’s A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan.

China’s private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu — often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition — this year opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots.

China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.

“It’s a race in the new generation of computing,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The difference is that China seems to think it’s a race and America doesn’t.”

Photo

Sören Schwertfeger testing his latest space detection and scanning robot. Credit Tim Franco for The New York Times

For Mr. Schwertfeger, the money mattered. He received a grant six times larger than what he might have gotten in Europe or America. That enabled him to set up a full artificial intelligence lab, with an assistant, a technician and a group of Ph.D. students.

“It’s almost impossible for assistant professors to get this much money,” he said. “The research funding is shrinking in the U.S. and Europe. But it is definitely expanding in China.”

Mr. Schwertfeger’s lab, which is part of ShanghaiTech U niversity , works on ways for machines, without any aid from humans, to avoid obstacles. Decked out with wheeled robots, drones and sensors, the lab works on ways for computers to make their own maps and to improve the performance of robots with tasks like finding objects — specifically, people — during search-and-rescue operations.

Much of China’s artificial intelligence push is similarly peaceful. Still, its prowess and dedication have set off alarms within the United States’ defense establishment. The Defense Department found that Chinese money has been pouring into American artificial intelligence companies — some of the same ones it had been looking to for future weapons systems.

Quantifying China’s spending push is difficult, because authorities there disclose little. But experts say it looks to be considerable. Numerous provinces and cities are spending billions on developing robotics, and a part of that funding is likely to go to artificial intelligence research. For example, the relatively unknown city of Xiangtan, in China’s Hunan province, has pledged $2 billion toward developing robots and artificial intelligence. Other places have direct incentives for the A.I. industry. In Suzhou, leading artificial intelligence companies can get about $800,000 in subsidies for setting up shop locally, while Shenzhen, in southern China, is offering $1 million to support any A.I. project established there.

On a national level, China is working on a system to predict events like terrorist attacks or labor strikes based on possible precursors like labor strife. A paper funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China showed how facial recognition software can be simplified so that it can be more easily integrated with cameras across the country.

China is preparing a concerted nationwide push, according to the two professors who advised on the effort but declined to be identified, because the effort has not yet been made public. While the size wasn’t clear, they said, it would most likely result in billions of dollars in spending.

President Trump’s proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation’s spending on so-called intelligent systems by 10 percent, to about $175 million. Research and development in other areas would also be cut, though the proposed budget does call for more spending on defense research and some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private American companies like Google and Facebook.

“The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. “They were talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being significantly affected.”

Photo

Journalists watching footage of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match between Lee Se-dol, one of the greatest modern players of the ancient board game Go, and the Google-developed AlphaGo. Credit Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

China’s money won’t necessarily translate into dominance. The government’s top-down approach, closed-mouth bureaucracy and hoarding of information can hobble research. It threw a tremendous amount of resources toward curing severe acute respiratory syndrome, the deadly virus known as SARS, when it

swept through the country 15 years ago. Yet the virus was eventually sequenced and tamed by a small Canadian lab, said Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. Shanghai and a technology writer.

“It wasn’t that anyone was trying to stop the development of a SARS vaccine,” Mr. Shirky said. “It’s the habit that yes is more risky than no.”

Authorities in China are now bringing top-down attention to fixing the problem of too much top-down control. While that may not sound promising, Wang Shengjin, a professor of electronic engineering at China’s Tsinghua University, said he had noticed some improvement, such as professional groups sharing information, and authorities who are rolling back limits on professors claiming ownership of their discoveries for commercial purposes.

“The lack of open sources and sharing of information, this has been the reality,” Mr. Wang said. “But it has started to change.”

At the moment, cooperation and exchanges in artificial intelligence between the United States and China are largely open, at least from the American side. Chinese and American scholars widely publish their findings in journals accessible to all, and researchers from China are major players in America’s research institutions.

Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Didi Chuxing have opened artificial intelligence labs in America, as have some Chinese start-ups. Over the past six years, Chinese investors helped finance 51 American artificial intelligence companies, contributing to the $700 million raised, according to the recent Pentagon report.

It’s unclear how long the cooperation will continue. The Pentagon report urged more controls. And while there are government and private pushes out of China, it is difficult to tell which is which, as Baidu shows.

Baidu is a leader in China’s artificial intelligence efforts. It is working on driverless cars. It has turned an app that started as a visual dictionary — take a picture of an object, and your cellphone will tell you what it is — into a site that uses facial recognition to find missing people, a major problem in a country where child kidnapping has been persistent. In one stunning example, it helped a family find a child kidnapped 27 years earlier. DNA testing confirmed the family connection.

Baidu’s speech-recognition software — which can accomplish the difficult task of hearing tonal differences in Chinese dialects — is considered top of the class. When Microsoft announced last October that its speech recognition software had surpassed human-level language recognition, Baidu’s head of research at the time playfully reminded the American company that his team had accomplished a similar feat a year earlier.

In an apparent effort to harness Baidu’s breakthroughs, China said this year that it would open a lab that would cooperate with the company on A.I. research. The facility will be headed by two professors with long experience working for government programs designed to catch up to and replace foreign technology. Both professors also worked on a program called the Tsinghua Mobile Robot, according to multiple academic papers published on the topic. Research behind the robot, which in one award is described as a “military-use intelligent ground robot,” was sponsored by funding to improve Chinese military capabilities.

Photo

Mr. Schwertfeger and his team working on an automated arm. Credit Tim Franco for The New York Times

Li Wei, a professor involved in the Baidu cooperative effort, spent much of his career at Beihang University, one of China’s seven schools of national defense.

A company spokeswoman said: “Baidu develops products and services that improve people’s lives. Through its partnership with the A.I. research community, Baidu aims to make a complicated world simpler through technology.”

Still, there are advantages in China’s developing cutting-edge A.I. on its own. National efforts are aided by access to enormous amounts of data held by Chinese companies and universities, the large number of Chinese engineers being trained on either side of the Pacific and from government backing, said Mr. Wang, of Tsinghua.

Driving that attention is a breakthrough from an American company largely banned in China: Google. In March 2016, a Google artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo, beat a South Korean player at the complicated strategy game Go, which originated in China. This past week, AlphaGo beat the best player in the world, a Chinese national, at a tournament in Wuzhen, China.

The Google event changed the tenor of government discussions about funding, according to several Chinese professors.

“After AlphaGo came out and had such a big impact on the industry,” said Zha Hongbin, a professor of machine learning at Peking University, “the content of government discussions got much wider and more concrete.” Shortly afterward, the government created a new project on brain-inspired computing, he added.

For all the government support, advances in the field could ultimately backfire, Mr. Shirky said. Artificial intelligence may help China better censor the internet, a task that often blocks Chinese researchers from finding vital information. At the same time, better A.I. could make it easier for Chinese readers to translate articles and other information.

“The fact is,” Mr. Shirky said, “unlike automobile engineering, artificial intelligence will lead to surprises. That will make the world considerably less predictable, and that’s never been Beijing’s favorite characteristic.”

WP

China has now eclipsed us in AI researchBy Brian Fung October 13, 2016

(iStock)

Humanity may still be years if not decades away from producing sentient artificial intelligence. But with the rise of machine-learning services in our smartphones and other devices, one type of narrow, specialized AI has become all the rage. And the research on this branch of AI is only accelerating.

In fact, as more industries and policymakers awaken to the benefits of machine learning, two countries appear to be pulling away in the research race. The results will probably have significant implications for the future of AI.

(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)

If you're not familiar with the term, “deep learning” is a subset of the overall branch of AI known as machine learning — which basically involves the use of computer algorithms to perform pattern recognition and analysis. It's this type of AI that powers personal digital assistants such as Google Now, for example.

The chart above was published Wednesday by the Obama administration as part of a new strategic plan aimed at spurring U.S. development of artificial intelligence. What's striking about it is that although the United States was an early leader on deep-learning research, China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject. The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted.

The Switch newsletter

The day's top stories on the world of tech.

The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart below narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.

(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)

Compared with other countries, the United States and China are spending tremendous research attention on deep learning. But, according to the White House, the United States is not investing nearly enough in basic research.

“Current levels of R&D spending are half to one-quarter of the level of R&D investment that would produce the optimal level of economic growth,” a companion report published this week by the Obama administration finds.

The government is pushing for a major role for itself in AI research, and here's why: Becoming a leader in artificial-intelligence research and development puts the United States in a better position to establish global norms on how AI should be used safely. When AI stands to transform virtually everything including labor, the environment, and the future of warfare and cyberconflict, the United States could be put at a disadvantage if other countries, such as China, get to dictate terms instead.

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecommunications, Internet access and the shifting media economy. Before joining The Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic

NYT

Technology

China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter点击查看本文中文版

By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERGFEB. 3, 2017

The Chinese-designed multicore processor of the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation. Credit Li Xiang/Xinhua, via Associated Press

Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield.

Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”

No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.

Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.

The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.

Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed that the company had created software capable of matching human skills in understanding speech.

Although they boasted that they had outperformed their United States competitors, a well-known A.I. researcher who leads a Silicon Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company Baidu gently taunted Microsoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese language two years earlier.

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded on the assumption of its continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter , President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third Offset” strategy provides a formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry with China and Russia.

Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military advantage based on technological leadership in nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon Valley technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining that military advantage with a significant commitment to artificial intelligence and robotic weapons.

But the global technology balance of power is shifting. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States carefully guarded its advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.

In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and universally available microchip upended the Pentagon’s ability to control technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come from consumer electronics firms. Put simply, the companies that make the fastest computers are the same ones that put things under our Christmas trees.

As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia, both Chinese companies and the nation’s government laboratories are making major investments in artificial intelligence.

The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial intelligence specialist, left the company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee the company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.

And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial intelligence research laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.

Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the United States between military strategists and technologists over whether the Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent innovation that will soon overtake the United States in the field.

“The Chinese leadership is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next wave of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Pacific.

Known as the Long Range Anti- Ship Missile , or L.R.A.S.M., it is described as a “semiautonomous” weapon. According to the Pentagon, this means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the missile uses artificial intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.

The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.

“They are making their machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the machines a tremendous boost.”

Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United States in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies is a matter of intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.

Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United States may be too myopic and self-confident to understand the speed of the Chinese competition.

“There are many occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or being invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But then U.S. media reports only on the U.S. version. This leads to a misperception of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”

Photo

Robert O. Work, left, the deputy secretary of defense, with James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, center, and Marcel Lettre, under secretary of defense for intelligence, in November. Mr. Work is trying to bring artificial intelligence to the battlefield. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

A key example of Chinese progress that goes largely unreported in the United States is Iflytek, an artificial intelligence company that has focused on speech recognition and understanding natural language. The company has won international competitions both in speech synthesis and in translation between Chinese- and English-language texts.

The company, which Chinese technologists said has a close relationship with the government for development of surveillance technology, said it is working with the Ministry of Science and Technology on a “Humanoid Answering Robot.”

“Our goal is to send the machine to attend the college entrance examination, and to be admitted by key national universities in the near future,” said Qingfeng Liu, Iflytek’s chief executive.

The speed of the Chinese technologists, compared to United States and European artificial intelligence developers, is noteworthy. Last April, Gansha Wu, then the director of Intel’s laboratory in China, left his post and began assembling a team of researchers from Intel and Google to build a self-driving car company. Last month, the company, Uisee Technology, met its goal — taking a demonstration to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — after just nine months of work.

“The A.I. technologies, including machine vision, sensor fusion, planning and control, on our car are completely home-brewed,” Mr. Wu said. “We wrote every line by ourselves.”

Their first vehicle is intended for controlled environments like college and corporate campuses, with the ultimate goal of designing a shared fleet of autonomous taxis.

The United States’ view of China’s advance may be starting to change. Last October, a White House report on artificial intelligence included several footnotes suggesting that China is now publishing more research than scholars here.

Still, some scientists say the quantity of academic papers does not tell us much about innovation. And there are indications that China has only recently begun to make A.I. a priority in its military systems.

“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Chinese researchers who are directly involved in artificial intelligence work in China have a very different view.

“It is indisputable that Chinese authors are a significant force in A.I., and their position has been increasing drastically in the past five years,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese-born artificial intelligence researcher who played a key role in establishing both Microsoft’s and Google’s China-based research laboratories.

Mr. Lee, now a venture capitalist who invests in both China and the United States, acknowledged that the United States is still the global leader but believes that the gap has drastically narrowed. His firm, Sinovation Ventures, has recently raised $675 million to invest in A.I. both in the United States and in China.

“Using a chess analogy,” he said, “we might say that grandmasters are still largely North American, but Chinese occupy increasingly greater portions of the master-level A.I. scientists.”

What is not in dispute is that the close ties between Silicon Valley and China both in terms of investment and research, and the open nature of much of the American A.I. research community, has made the most advanced technology easily available to China.

In addition to setting up research outposts such as Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Laboratory, Chinese citizens, including government employees, routinely audit Stanford University artificial intelligence courses.

One Stanford professor, Richard Socher, said it was easy to spot the Chinese nationals because after the first few weeks, his students would often skip class, choosing instead to view videos of the lectures. The Chinese auditors, on the other hand, would continue to attend, taking their seats at the front of the classroom.

Artificial intelligence is only one part of the tech frontier where China is advancing rapidly.

Last year, China also brought the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, online, supplanting another Chinese model that had been the world’s fastest. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation, a shift from its role as a manufacturing hub for components and devices designed in the United States and elsewhere.

In a reflection of the desire to become a center of innovation, the processors in the new computer are of a native Chinese design. The earlier supercomputer, the Tianhe 2, was powered by Intel’s Xeon processors; after it came online, the United States banned further export of the chips to China, in hopes of limiting the Chinese push into supercomputing.

The new supercomputer, like similar machines anywhere in the world, has a variety of uses, and does not by itself represent a direct military challenge. It can be used to model climate change situations, for instance, or to perform analysis of large data sets.

But similar advances in high-performance computing being made by the Chinese could be used to push ahead with machine-learning research, which would have military applications, along with more typical defense functions, such as simulating nuclear weapons tests or breaking the encryption used by adversaries.

Moreover, while there appear to be relatively cozy relationships between the Chinese government and commercial technology efforts, the same cannot be said about the United States. The Pentagon recently restarted its beachhead in Silicon Valley, known as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental facility, or DIUx. It is an attempt to rethink bureaucratic United States government contracting practices in terms of the faster and more fluid style of Silicon Valley.

The government has not yet undone the damage to its relationship with the Valley brought about by Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. Many Silicon Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely with the Pentagon out of fear of losing access to China’s market.

“There are smaller companies, the companies who sort of decided that they’re going to be in the defense business, like a Palantir,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert in the future of war at New America, a think tank in Washington, referring to the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up founded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “But if you’re thinking about the big, iconic tech companies, they can’t become defense contractors and still expect to get access to the Chinese market.”

Those concerns are real for Silicon Valley.

“No one sort of overtly says that, because the Pentagon can’t say it’s about China, and the tech companies can’t,” Mr. Singer said. “But it’s there in the background.”

The Economist

The algorithm kingdom

China may match or beat America in AI

Its deep pool of data may let it lead in artificial intelligenceJul 15th 2017 | BEIJING

AT THE start of this year, two straws in the wind caught the attention of those who follow the development of artificial intelligence (AI) globally. First, Qi Lu, one of the bosses of Microsoft, said in January that he would not return to the world’s largest software firm after recovering from a cycling accident, but instead would become chief operating officer at Baidu, China’s leading search engine. Later that month, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence postponed its annual meeting. The planned date for the event in January conflicted with the Chinese new year.

These were the latest signals that China could be a close second to America—and perhaps even ahead of it—in some areas of AI, widely considered vital to everything from digital assistants to self-driving cars. China is simply the place to be, explains Mr Lu, and Baidu the country’s most important player. “We have an opportunity to lead in the future of AI,” he says.

Other evidence supports the claim. In October 2016 the White House noted in a report that China had overtaken America in the number of published journal articles on deep learning, a branch of AI. PwC, a consultancy, predicts that AI-related growth will boost global GDP by $16trn by 2030; nearly half of that bonanza will accrue to China, it reckons. The number of AI-related patent submissions by Chinese researchers has increased by nearly 200% in recent years, although America is still ahead in absolute numbers (see chart).

To understand why China is so well placed, consider the inputs needed for AI. Of the two most basic, computing power and capital, it has an abundance. Chinese firms, from giants such as Alibaba and Tencent to startups such as CIB FinTech and UCloud, are building data centres as fast as they can. The market for cloud computing has been growing by more than 30% in recent years and will continue to do so, according to Gartner, a consultancy. In 2012-16 Chinese AI firms received $2.6bn in funding, according to the Wuzhen Institute, a think-tank. That is less than the $17.9bn that poured into their American peers, but the total is growing quickly.

Yet it is two other resources that truly make China a promised land for AI. One is research talent. As well as strong skills in maths, the country has a tradition in language and translation research, says Harry Shum, who leads Microsoft’s AI efforts. Finding top-notch AI experts is harder in China than in America, says Wanli Min, who oversees 150 data scientists at Alibaba. But this will change over the next couple of years, he predicts, because most big universities have launched AI programmes. According to some estimates, China has more than two-fifths of the world’s trained AI scientists.

The second advantage for China is data, AI’s most important ingredient. In the past, software and digital products mostly obeyed rules laid down in code, giving an edge to those countries with the best coders. With the advent of deep-learning algorithms, such rules are increasingly based on patterns extracted from reams of data. The more data are available, the more algorithms can learn and the smarter AI offerings will be.

China’s sheer size and diversity provide powerful fuel for this cycle. Just by going about their daily lives, the country’s nearly 1.4bn people generate more data than almost all other nations combined. Even in the case of a rare disease, there are enough examples to teach an algorithm how to recognise it. Because typing Chinese characters is more laborious than Western ones, people also tend to use voice-recognition services more often than in the West, so firms have more voice snippets with which to improve speech offerings.

The Saudi Arabia of data

What really sets China apart is that it has more internet users than any other country: about 730m. Almost all go online from smartphones, which generate far more valuable data than desktop computers, chiefly because they contain sensors and are carried around. In the big coastal cities, for instance, cash has all but

disappeared for small purchases: people settle with their devices using services such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Chinese do not seem to be terribly concerned about privacy, which makes collecting data easier. The country’s bike-sharing services, which have taken big cities by storm, for example, not only provide cheap transport but are what is known as a “data play”. When riders hire a bicycle, some firms keep track of renters’ movements using a GPS device attached to the bike.

Young Chinese appear particularly keen on AI-powered services and relaxed about use of their data. Xiaoice, an upbeat chatbot operated by Microsoft, now has more than 100m Chinese users. Most talk to it between 11pm and 3am, often about the problems they had during the day. It is learning from interactions and becoming cleverer. Xiaoice no longer just provides encouragement and tells jokes, but has created the first collection of poems written with AI, “Sunshine Lost Its Window”, which caused a heated debate in Chinese literary circles over whether there can be such a thing as artificial poetry.

Another important source of support for AI in China is the government. The technology figures prominently in the country’s current five-year plan. Technology firms are working closely with government agencies: Baidu, for example, has been asked to lead a national laboratory for deep learning. It is unlikely that the government will burden AI firms with over-strict regulation. The country has more than 40 laws containing rules about the protection of personal data, but these are rarely enforced.

Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of China’s talent and data strengths. Many AI firms got going only a year or two ago, but plenty have been progressing more rapidly than their Western counterparts. “Chinese AI startups often iterate and execute more quickly,” explains Kai-Fu Lee, who ran Google’s subsidiary in China in the 2000s and now leads Sinovation Ventures, a venture-capital fund.

As a result, China already has a herd of AI unicorns, meaning startups valued at more than $1bn. Toutiao, a news aggregator based in Beijing, employs machine learning to recommend articles using information such as a reader’s interests and location; it also uses AI to filter out fake information (which in China mainly means dubious health-care announcements). Another AI startup, iFlytek, has developed a voice assistant that translates Mandarin into several languages, including English and German, even if the speaker uses slang and talks over background noise. And Megvii Technology’s face-recognition software, Face++, identifies people almost instantaneously.

Skynet lives

At Megvii’s headquarters, visitors are treated to a demonstration. A video camera in the lobby does away with the need for showing ID: employees just walk in without showing their badges. Similar devices are positioned all over the office and their feeds are shown on a video wall. When a face pops up on the wall, it is immediately surrounded by a white rectangle and some text giving information about that person. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen big letters spell “Skynet”, the name of the AI system in the Terminator films that seeks to exterminate the human race. The firm already enables Alipay and Didi, a ride-hailing firm, to check the identity of new customers (their faces are compared with pictures held by the government).

Reacting to the success of such startups, China’s tech giants, too, have begun to invest heavily in AI. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, collectively called BAT, are working on many of the same services, including speech- and face-recognition. But they are also trying to become dominant in specific areas of AI, based on their existing strengths.

Tencent has so far kept the lowest profile; it established its AI labs only in recent months. But it is bound to develop a big presence in AI: it has more data than the other two. Its WeChat messenger service has nearly 1bn accounts and is also the platform for thousands of services, from payments and news to city guides and

legal help. Tencent is also a world-beater in games with blockbusters such as League of Legends and Clash of Clans, which have more than 100m players each globally.

Alibaba is already a behemoth in e-commerce and is investing billions to become number one in cloud computing. At a conference in June in Shanghai it showed off an AI service called “ET City Brain” that uses video recognition to optimise traffic in real time. It uses footage from roadside cameras to predict the behaviour of cars and can adjust traffic lights on the spot. In its home town of Hangzhou, Alibaba claims, the system has already increased the average speed of traffic by 11%. Alibaba is also planning to beef up what it calls “ET Medical Brain”, which will offer AI-powered services to discover drugs and diagnose medical images. It has signed up a dozen hospitals to get the data it needs.

But it is Baidu whose fate is most tied to AI, in part because the technology may be its main chance to catch up with Alibaba and Tencent. It is putting most of its resources into autonomous driving: it wants to get a self-driving car onto the market by 2018 and to provide technology for fully autonomous vehicles by 2020. On July 5th the firm announced a first version of its self-driving-car software, called Apollo, at a developer conference in Beijing.

Getting Apollo right will not only involve cars safely navigating the streets, but managing a project that is open to outsiders. Rivals such as Waymo, Google’s subsidiary, and Tesla, an electric-car firm, jealously guard their software and the data they collect. Baidu is planning not only to publish the recipe for its programs (making them “open-source”, in the jargon), but to share data. The idea is that carmakers that use Baidu’s technology will do the same, creating an open platform for data from self-driving cars—the “Android for autonomous vehicles”, in the words of Mr Lu.

Drive like a Beijinger

It remains to be seen how successful Chinese firms will be in exporting their AI products—for now, only a tiny handful are used abroad. In theory they should travel well: a self-driving car trained on China’s chaotic streets ought to have no problem navigating the more civilised traffic in Europe (in contrast, a vehicle trained in Germany may not get far beyond the first intersection in Beijing). But consumers in the West may hesitate to use self-driving cars that have been trained in a laxer safety environment that is more tolerant of accidents. Chinese municipalities are said to be falling over themselves to be testing grounds for autonomous vehicles.

There is another risk. Data are the most valuable input for AI at the moment, but their importance may yet diminish. AI firms have started to use simulated data, including those from video games. New types of algorithms may be capable of getting smart with fewer examples. “The danger is that we stop innovating in algorithms because of our advantage in data,” warns Gansha Wu, chief executive of UISEE, a Beijing startup which is developing self-driving technology. For now, though, China looks anything but complacent. In the race for pre-eminence in AI, it will run America close.

NYT

Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030By PAUL MOZURJULY 20, 2017

The Google artificial intelligence program AlphaGo defeated the world’s top Go player, Ke Jie of China, in May. Credit Wu Hong/European Pressphoto Agency

SHANGHAI — If Beijing has its way, the future of artificial intelligence will be made in China.

The country laid out a development plan on Thursday to become the world leader in A.I. by 2030, aiming to surpass its rivals technologically and build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion.

Released by the State Council, the policy is a statement of intent from the top rungs of China’s government: The world’s second-largest economy will be investing heavily to ensure its companies, government and military leap to the front of the pack in a technology many think will one day form the basis of computing.

The plan comes with China preparing a multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support “moonshot” projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I., according to two professors who consulted with the government about the effort.

The United States, meanwhile, has cut back on science funding. In budget proposals, the Trump administration has suggested slashing resources for a number of agencies that have traditionally backed research in A.I. Other cuts, to areas like high-performance computing, would affect the development of the tools that make A.I. work.

China’s capabilities, especially in advanced and new technologies, have long lagged those of its better developed neighbors as well as Europe and America. But a multiple-decade industrial policy to help it catch up has paid dividends.

A.I. is one of a growing number of disciplines in which experts say China is making quick progress.

Yet it was a foreign feat of A.I. prowess that provided one of the greatest impetuses for the new plan.

The two professors who consulted with the government on A.I. both said that the 2016 defeat of Lee Se-dol, a South Korean master of the board game Go, by Google’s AlphaGo had a profound impact on politicians in China. Then in May, Google brought AlphaGo to China, where it defeated the world’s top-ranked player, Ke Jie of China. Live video coverage of the event was blocked at the last minute in China.

As a sort of Sputnik moment for China, the professors said, the event paved the way for a new flow of funds into the discipline.

China’s ambitions with A.I. range from the anodyne to the dystopian, according to the new plan. It calls for support for everything from agriculture and medicine to manufacturing.

Yet it also calls for the technology to work in concert with the country’s homeland security and surveillance efforts. China wants to integrate A.I. into guided missiles, use it to track people on closed-circuit cameras, censor the internet and even predict crimes.

Beijing’s interest in the technology has set off alarms within the United States’ defense establishment. The Defense Department found that Chinese money has been flowing into American A.I. companies — some of the same ones it says are likely to help the United States military develop future weapons systems.

In a timeline laid out within the new policy, the government expects its companies and research facilities to be at the same level as leading countries like the United States by 2020. Five years later, it calls for breakthroughs in select disciplines within A.I. that will become “a key impetus for economic transformation.”

In the final stage, by 2030, China will “become the world’s premier artificial intelligence innovation center,” which in turn will “foster a new national leadership and establish the key fundamentals for an economic great power.”

While the language in Chinese industrial policy can sound stodgy and the targets overly ambitious, Beijing takes its economic planning seriously. Experts say that even if major spending efforts ultimately waste resources, they can also produce results, bolstering technology capabilities with a flood of resources.

Top-level statements like this also work as a signal to local governments and companies across the country.

The new plan formalizes a focus that was widely known in China. Following those cues, a large number of local governments have created special plans and built out research centers to focus on A.I.

Many are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, but some have earmarked even more. In June, the government of Tianjin, an eastern city near Beijing, said it planned to set up a $5 billion fund to support the A.I. industry. It also set up an “intelligence industry zone” that will sit on more than 20 square kilometers of land.

The initiative is also likely to sweep up private Chinese companies. The country’s internet search giant Baidu, which has run an A.I. research center out of Silicon Valley in recent years, announced this year that it would open a new lab in cooperation with the government. The two leaders of that lab have worked on Chinese government programs with military applications.