China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

https://www.investopedia.com/news/china-will-overtake-us-ai-alphabet-chairman/?partner=YahooSA&yptr=yahoo

by nopinsight • 8 years ago

71 68 8 years ago

alexnewman• 8 years ago

i read the research. chinese contributions are amazing but it’s a world wide phenomena

polskibus• 8 years ago

It's hard to say how much is this about scaring the government into action (AI-McCarthyism), or about being jealous that China is not constrained like Western countries are when experimenting with AI because of ingrained in society respect towards privacy, human rights, having to listen to the public opinion (democracy), etc.

In another HN thread about AI, big corporations and China, someone mentioned that big American IT corporations are very active in China, offering their tech for pennies just to be able to test it on a wider scale, because in the West they can't do it (regulations, human rights, etc.).

There are many problems unsolved, where a lot of grunt work is needed and little progress has been made in the last decades - healthcare is expensive, many diseases are still uncurable, production is still cheaper to outsource to other countries than do it locally because automation (not just AI, also sensors, computing power, materials, etc.) are not there yet.

I think the general trend to see current AI iteration as the magical solutions to all problems is dangerous, as usual the reality is much more complex and should be tackled in a more thorough manner. Why not pay AI-specialist pay to get the best people into healthcare, new material research, etc?

seanmcdirmid5• 8 years ago

Ya, it sounds like a scare tactic. China does have advantages, mainly, they have lots of data with less concern for privacy.

The Chinese are making huge bets on AI, but they are beginning to sound like Japan in the 1980s with their Fifth generation computing project. Actually, there are so many analogues of China today to Japan in the 1980s (huge housing bubble, booming economy that doesn't seem to stop, a huge bet on AI....) that it doesn't really seem like a coincidence.

Barrin923• 8 years ago

I don't think the comparison to 'neo tokyo' fantasies is warranted. When people were scared of Japan taking over the world with robots, those fifth generation projects were moonshot technologies without any clear commercial application.

The difference is that ML today (at least the kind of technologies where China has and is gaining an edge) are deeply embedded in the commercial sector and public security.

We're not talking about China building a superintelligence in some kind of basement of a research facility, we're talking about facial recognition in public spaces, consumer products that get data from a billion customers who all pay and live on a centralised platform and so on. That's a reality already and it's not a stretch to say that China's environment is more suited for this than any other place on the planet.

otakucode• 8 years ago

Why not pay AI-specialist pay to get the best people into healthcare, new material research, etc?

Because that's expensive, and companies are still structured in a manner built and optimized for repetitive manufacturing. They are not built to, and as a result can not, value things like knowledge and skill. Everything from why they have offices, to how those offices are built, to how the organizations are structured is anathema to having a person or persons with valuable domain knowledge as a key component. Read essentially any book on business management written since 1980 up to today. Every single one of them will advise managers to highly prioritize the dispensability of employees and inherently emphasizes accounting ('business') oriented roles over technical ones.

Remember, IT is a cost center. Anything spent on it, or those with skills in it, is pure loss that offers no value. You're a healthcare company, not an IT company, and IT people don't even see patients.

pedrosorio3• 8 years ago

"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions."

In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did the same 40 times (notably last year there were 13 Russian contestants, half of the finalists).

If this is evidence that China is going to dominate AI, what does it say about Russia?

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

Russia is probably doping their participants though.

loverofthings• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure there's a handful of those that find meaningful work. Then a handful of those that find it in AI.

fooker• 8 years ago

This is evidence that the Chinese education system is not inferior. Nothing more.

The argument about AI lead is based on other facts, not particularly this one.

pedrosorio3• 8 years ago

I don't think performance of the best on these contests says much about the education system (other than possibly how much exposure does the education system provide to this kind of contest from a young age).

sjg0072• 8 years ago

He should measure that on proportion. China has way more people. So in that regard, the Russians are very good, in fact, probably the best, but they are constrained by their country and economy. The USA imports talent and uses that talent creatively in the economy. If we stop importing talent we are screwed. If we stop increasing our population size we are also basically screwed. China has a billion or so people to feed. They own global manufacturing. A push to robotics and AI based technologies will cause some major disruption to their internal economy.

barrkel• 8 years ago

And are participants equally likely from all countries globally?

It seems to me that people who lack other means of signalling excellence and are ambitious to become visible internationally are most likely to enter such competitions.

WheelsAtLarge• 8 years ago

China's will to move forward is astonishingly great. Remember that in the 70's it was close to a 3rd world nation. In less than 50 years it's challenging the US in technology. Sure a big part of that has been just copying what we already know in terms of technology but I see no slowing down from their part. To become a master at anything 1st you copy and try to match the master once you have matched the master you move past it. China is close to matching the master and they're not slowing down. Eric Smith is just reporting on what he sees as an inevitable outcome.

rayiner2• 8 years ago

You can’t extrapolate trends continuously forward into the future. At the turn of the 20th century Russia was closer in GDP per capita to India and China than to the US. By the 1950s, they beat the US in every space race milestone, and would’ve beaten us to the moon if the head of their space program hadn’t died at an inopportune time. But ultimately it wasn’t sustainable.

yusee2• 8 years ago

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government.

Dear Alphabet,

Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of power.

hartator• 8 years ago

This. What is worrying me is core services seem to perform worst than before like GMail, but even search or YouTube.

propman• 8 years ago

Yes! Another thread a while back had a good discussion on this. Gmail, google search and YouTube search have all been terrible last few years. Ever since they started touting ML, I think they started to cut costs and it's been terrible using all 3 services whereas they used to be amazing a few years before.

joshuamorton2• 8 years ago

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity)

What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

krutzger• 8 years ago

Maybe Gmail was a has example. How about the Google play store?

sjg0072• 8 years ago

I get spammed by cybercoders even though I click unsubscribe and report spam all the time.

The other issue I have is that the search function doesn't update... I try to search for an email from the day before and it won't show up.

singularity20012• 8 years ago

How about: I send someone an email, he answers, his answer is classified as spam. That's as broken as it can get!

(presumably because google doesn't like 'free' servers)

pitaj• 8 years ago

Lately I've been getting a ton of spam in the form of Amazon phishing attacks. Usually these emails use character substitution or the like to avoid being caught.

I've also noticed recently that spam hits my inbox before being filtered, which is aggravating as that means I get a notification about it.

mkstowegnv• 8 years ago

I implore you to solicit users who will volunteer their spam folders so that you can improve your algorithm. It has always been badly broken for me and many if not most people I know (worst story my lawyer friend who finds important email from judges in this spam folder). Right now my spam folder is 171 emails that are 80% legitimate. Most of them are messages from political groups and businesses that I don't care about, but about once every other month I curse when I find something that does matter. I move some "spam" emails to my Inbox but I do not have time to train your system by correcting all the mistakes. It is so bad that I would prefer not to have the spam removed and see all my email with some kind of "might be spam" flagging to aid my speedreading of the daily torrent.

helthanatos• 8 years ago

This is the same as making government issues partisan to develop some sort of race and opposition. China already does the vast majority of manufacturing technology. It doesn't really matter what country does it. In the end, it will just be a smaller amount of money going to US businesses. Better ai has many applications but personal robot butlers and such have a while.

Chardok• 8 years ago

Yet another US tech billionaire practically fetishizing China for their devotion to technology over people...

Sure, I can certainly get behind greater funding for scientific research and education for our benefit, but China is certainly not a country I would like to emulate whatsoever.

My biggest question is, what is the meaning and implication of China "dominating" the AI industries? China overtaking the US in military and commercial might? This honestly seems unlikely.

And a follow up question is, besides government funding, what else is China doing to secure AI dominance? Putting human rights and regulations on the back burner would appear give them a competitive advantage - but is this worth the cost of privacy and freedom for the average citizen?

'"Shockingly some of the best people are in countries we won't let into America,' he said. "Iran produces some of the smartest and top computer scientists in the world. I want them here. I want them working for Alphabet and Google. It's crazy not to let these people in."'

Well now I am not following this logic at all. What is China doing to make working there more attractive? I would imagine the US looks a lot more attractive than China in terms of freedom and safety regulations.

If anyone has a copy of the AI report in English I would greatly appreciate it.

AstralStorm• 8 years ago

Easy to answer. China has billions of people and is getting exceedingly good at finding enough talent in this huge pool. This is sort of similar in Russia which has the additional advantage of better tuned education system and just as few scruples.

pedrosorio3• 8 years ago

China has billions of people

Calm down, it hasn't even reached 1.5 billion yet.

chvid• 8 years ago

China's GDP outgrows the west's by 5-10 percentage points pr. year. This means that in about 10 years China's economy in size will be twice that of the US.

That means China will dominate in most engineering fields. Also some where the US today is an absolute leader.

Spooky23• 8 years ago

China is a juggernaut and will overtake the US, but I would guess in 20-30 years.

Economic figures from China are not very reliable. But they are making smart investments while the US is mostly moving money from one pile to another.

pacala• 8 years ago

Not sure about "will surpass". Possibly the inflection point already happened.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china...

The 2017 AAAI meeting—which ultimately relocated to San Francisco—wrapped up just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in the historically U.S.-dominated conference. A nearly equal number of accepted papers came from researchers based in China and the U.S. “This is pretty surprising and impressive given how different it was even three, four years back,” says Rao.

yusee2• 8 years ago

China is even more of a surveillance society than the US. America's top advertiser isn't happy. I am OK with America losing the race for total state control of information.

rayiner2• 8 years ago

Fun fact: China’s GDP per capita growth over the last 25 years is only modestly more than Japan’s GDP per capita growth from 1970-1995 (20.5x versus 24.5x).

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

I wonder how China would cope with a long period of economic stagnation like Japan has had without the democratic release valve of being able to vote in another party. I wouldn't be surprised to see it all unravel.

olympus2• 8 years ago

He claims the US government isn't investing in AI. That's false. They're investing in AI, they just aren't giving any money to Google. What would the government do with an AI tuned for advertising? This is likely just Schmidt complaining about not getting free money from the government for once. Besides, it seems like Google is investing plenty of their own money into AI research without the government needing to contribute.

What will kill the US in AI research is when the government starts slapping export controls on everything and preventing foreign nationals from doing top level AI research in the US. Then all the talent will go to other countries.

jessriedel• 8 years ago

What US govt investments are you referring to?

olympus2• 8 years ago

There is literally millions, and probably billions of dollars of spending that the military, NSA, and other agencies have put towards AI. Just about every military system with a computer has an effort to get some sort of AI onboard to decrease the workload of the operators and increase the effectiveness of the system. There are cognitive radios that aim to be jam-proof and make better use of the spectrum, smart ship management systems, adaptive self defense systems for jets, etc. The NSA uses AI to filter large amounts of data before a person ever sees it. The government is spending tons of money on AI, but many projects are classified and you aren't going to hear Lockheed bragging about how much money they are getting to upgrade their ships/tanks/jets with AI.

chriskanan• 8 years ago

The US government has been investing in AI, but that spending has been relatively flat compared to China. China is increasing its spending in AI each year and has been advertising that they aim to be number one in AI. They are even adding AI to pre-college education.

https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c58...

kozikow• 8 years ago

Looking at it from different angle than policy and surveillance other comments are focusing on:

- I can't find any concrete data, but it feels like at least 50% of publications on conferences like NIPS or CVPR are made by Chinese nationals. Even if it is initially from USA universities, many researchers are going back, either due to unfavorable Visa situation or else.

- Even among Silicon Valley investors, funds with China roots are relatively much more into AI startups

praulv• 8 years ago

No doubt given a giant step ahead by open source initiatives such as TensorFlow, ironically.

kore• 8 years ago

The Chinese government's R&D initiatives are what's making the difference here. They've further laid out specific goals for particular technologies such as automated vehicles, drones, medical diagnosis, and machine translation, and their rate of R&D spend is on pace to overtake the US in the coming years.

For all its faults, their leadership has their eyes properly set on science and technology as a means to challenge the US economically and militarily. They're incentivizing the proper areas where they want industry to operate, and are better poised to take advantage of it. The US government is hampered by dysfunction in comparison.

Would hope the US sees what's at risk here, and moves from underestimating the threat, to overestimating it and taking massive action as they often do.

Better summary here: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china

nopinsight7• 8 years ago

To give additional evidence why Eric Schmidt's comment has a basis in reality (and to reply to many sceptical comments here):

* 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example.

https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

It is not like others do not try. This is a highly commercializable area of research and there is no requirement to publish the technical details of the submitted solution.

* Based on publications from 2015 onward, Peking and Tsinghua University are ranked in the world's top 5 for published papers in top AI conferences (at #3 and #5).

http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...

* China plans to add AI and programming courses in primary education. It is likely that soon, if not already, the proportion of US middle and high schools that offer computer science courses will be lower than China's.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0828/c90000-9261282.html

* Most Chinese kids spend a significant amount of time working on their academics, even outside of school (whether this is good or bad at the individual level is different from the main topic of discussion here), while the same cannot be said about most American children.

* Since 2000, China's team was no. 1 in International Math Olympiad 12 times (out of 18) and 5 times at no. 2

https://imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=CHN

* Mathematics is an important foundation of AI. One needs to be relatively competent at math to understand most AI research papers and even textbooks. The level of math required may look basic to some HN readers but it still takes many years of focused learning to master for most people. Many smart people do not master math simply because they haven't spent the time.

The difference in math skills between the US and China high school students is evident in PISA 2015 results. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the potential proportion of AI-capable natives in China could be 5 times as large as the US. Since China has more than 4 times the population, the potential number could be 20 times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569339

* China is doing everything it can to attract back their top talent as well as those from other countries. A reason for pollution curb, which starts to become successful, is to satisfy talent's requirement for quality of life. They have instituted a competitive program to attract global talent. (At the same time, the US is not exactly sending a welcome signal.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-ar...

dyoo1979• 8 years ago

Another point: the documentary about FineArt from Tencent makes it very clear that folks there consider the race for AI analogously to the race to the atomic bomb. https://www.reddit.com/r/cbaduk/comments/7ryw0q/7_fine_art_d...

philee• 8 years ago

Counter-example: Geoffrey Hinton (who developed backpropagation), has a self-proclaimed phobia of mathematics. There's plenty more to innovation than solving those IMO problems, Google Code Jams, etc, because they involve very specific practice (and over-fit the needed skillsets).

It's instead the encouraging atmosphere and resultant inflows of capital (intellectual and otherwise) that may put China ahead in the future.

nopinsight7• 8 years ago

Geoffrey Hinton may not be excellent at math at the professional level but if one watches his talks and lectures, it’s clear that he is more competent than 99% of most populations.

AI requires more than math, but one cannot work competently in AI without being competent at math. Based on teaching experience, I would estimate the lower threshold to be about 2SD above global average (or equivalent to 700 PISA score in math), which might mean less than 2% of US high school students are above that threshold.

aje403• 8 years ago

We’re way ahead in cryptocurrency startups. We should definitely take that into account.

China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

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