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China has become a major player in AI
- axaxs 9y agoI almost wonder if this was a ploy by the American companies. AI is being injected into all apps and even pushed as major feature, but, at least in my circle of friends, nobody cares or wants that. Most people use Whatsapp, with no AI. Google is trying Allo, to no success, and Facebook is pushing M, also to no success. I think AI is brilliant and could be the future, but from my experience, people generally don't want it in the ways it's being pushed. I definitely see the 'AI' and 'ML' markets, somewhat tied together, switching gears soon.
- edgyswingset 9y agoIn consumer products, perhaps not. Business systems? Oh, you betcha. Note: I'm interpreting AI as "also the very useful subset of AI called Machine Learning" here. ML is already in so many things, but I think it truly has yet to take off. But I very much believe that it will be ubiquitous. It's probably worth it for programmers to learn some of the basic algorithms, general approaches, and what they're good for.
- axaxs 9y agoI agree. That's kind of my point. AI now seems tied to data mining consumers. Consumers don't want this. It is much better served behind the scenes, or in business settings. The majority of people just don't want a creepy assistant.
- pharrlax 9y agoI'm constantly amused, when I see articles like this, that I've yet to see any application of AI as impressive as Akinator, and it's been around for a full decade.
- kyleschiller 9y agoFacebook's M has had limited success, but on the other hand, News Feed, the core of Facebook's business, is build entirely around AI. And Google, of course, has had plenty of success with AI outside of Allo. I wouldn't say "nobody cares or wants" AI, just that companies are still trying to figure out where it's best used.
- axaxs 9y agoYou're right...kinda. AI is used in many places. Where it's advertised as a feature? Failure. Where it's used in the backend? People don't seem to have much of a choice. I stand by my statement.
- GuiA 9y agoReminds me of the (imo, erroneous) dichotomy between "strong" and "weak" AI back in the day. Strong AI is what captures the imagination of the crowds, but weak AI is what actually brings the money despite not being as sexy. Of course many things that we take for granted now would have been considered strong AI 40 years ago; the definition is constantly shifting.
- tnecniv 9y agoI forget where I heard it, but someone once pointed out that AI, before the recent DL boom, refers to things that we don't know how to do. As soon as we know how to solve a problem, it gets a much more apt name.
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- euske 9y agoBack in 90s, some Japanese manufacturers (e.g. Panasonic) tried to sell AI-based home appliances such as rice cookers or washing machines. The buzzword then was "Fuzzy Logic" instead of NN. Don't know how successful they were, but it seemed like a classic case of selling features instead of stories. Ordinary people don't buy stuff because of its features.
- mtw 9y agoI'm sure people know and like self-driving Teslas Alexa is quite popular, Snapchat filters (&clones) likewise Google search and many other popular products (YouTube video captioning) are also driven by AI I agree with you though - we are not yet there for chatbots!
- Vinnl 9y agoThere's so many ways it is being used, and many of it are seen as useful by consumers, I think. For example, better autocorrect/prediction of the next word you're going to type, smarter text selection, ...
- tim333 9y agoMessaging is perhaps a bad place for AI as people use it specifically to chat to real human intelligences and don't want weird AI butting in. I'm sure there are lots of other areas where it is useful like the robots avoiding obstacles mentioned in the article.
- chongli 9y agoI will take better AI for predictive text entry on touch screen keyboards any day of the week. I use Android's built-in keyboard with swipe typing and it does fix some things but it could go much further.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoI think most "AI" efforts right now are in an uncanny valley of usefulness. They're "intelligent" enough to be troublesome and difficult to program with, but not "intelligent" as in AI-complete. We get used to the speech recognition working until suddenly it doesn't, and then we just wish we could type and click our way through.
- deepnotderp 9y ago"United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established." Assuming this is talking about deep learning, I wish this myth would die, but it's repeated again and again, by people like Ted Cruz and media outlets with little knowledge. Deep learning was pioneered in Canada, not the US....
- flexie 9y agoWhy people would downvote that I don't know. https://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614684/ai-conspiracy-the-scientists-behind-deep-learning https://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614684/ai-conspiracy-the-... I would say that grenerally it doesn't matter much where ideas come from but since that's the point of the article they ought to be more precise.
- screye 9y agoDeep Learning is only a small part of AI research. A big part of the rest of machine learning & AI research has been pioneered in the US. However, there have been some huge contributions by UK and Canada throughout the growth of AI.
- deepnotderp 9y agoDupe from my other reply, but the general sentiment is the same: Again, I was assuming this is talking about deep learning. I understand that hating on deep learning is popular, but the current AI boom, including AlphaGo (which triggered the Chinese interest in AI according to this article) is driven by deep learning.
- abrichr 9y agoAlso Reinforcement Learning, pioneered by Rich Sutton's group at the University of Alberta.
- screye 9y agoWould just like to put in a mention for Andy Barto (Sutton's pHD advisor) who has contributed as much as Sutton to reinforcement learning. Although Barto is retired now, Barto's lab at UMass Amherst is still alive and kicking (led by another of his pHD and incoming UMass asst. professor in Phil Thomas).
- aub3bhat 9y agoThis trend is also evident in conferences like ICML, CVPR and EMNLP.[1] I have a semi-popular open source ML project [2] and the repo gets more Chinese visitors/users (from posts on Weibo/WeChat etc.) than all other countries including USA. I think Chinese researchers & government have a key advantage in collecting enormous datasets, e.g. I wouldn't be amazed if they end up with state of the art models for problems such as object-detection/segmentation for videos taken from Vehicles, Medicine/Radiology and face recognition [3]. Several US strategic funding agencies seem to be pursuing projects with this implicit assumption. While american government agencies do collect data at a similar scale (Body Cams, Police dashcams), inefficiency in data sharing significantly complicate their use. [1] https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institution-stats-bad8d2943f5d https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institutio... [2] http://www.deepvideoanalytics.com/ http://www.deepvideoanalytics.com/ [3] https://github.com/seetaface/SeetaFaceEngine https://github.com/seetaface/SeetaFaceEngine On an unrelated note: If you have a popular Github repo, you can view the Google Analytics style stats under graphs/traffic for referring urls/unique-visitor counts etc.
- visarga 9y agoThis is not news to anyone who reads AI papers: the number of Chinese authors is amazing.
- dirtyaura 9y agoCrazy thought: what if the AI is in 10-20 years the first field in which major breakthroughs will be first published in Mandarin instead of in English. Language is power, and currently English speaking countries have the edge.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThose top-rated Chinese researchers are publishing in English. Their Chinese-only venues are not at the caliber that they would consider publishing ground breaking work to.
- jjawssd 9y agoChinese students are getting top tier educations in the United States only to be forced to return home because of absurd F visa restrictions which effectively prohibit them from gainful employment in the United States after completing their studies. It's pitiful and sad.
- GuiA 9y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted, because that exact thing has happened to many of my former lab mates. Giving a green card to anyone with a graduate degree in STEM fields would be the most sensible thing to do if the US wanted to avoid the reverse brain drain of foreign graduates educated mostly on the US taxpayer's money. The vast majority of those grads would be very happy to stay in the US.
- dis-sys 9y agoThat is not true and the reason is obvious - bamboo ceiling in American companies. Think about it - Chinese grads have far higher chance to be promoted to a senior position in companies like BAT and all of them pay you well.
- ajmurmann 9y agoIs the bamboo ceiling string enough and well known enough that it would drive a majority of Chinese graduates from US schools out of the country even if they received a green card? I don't find this assumption oblivious at all. It's easy to underestimate discrimination if you aren't the ones being discriminated. Do you happen to have any data on the actual discrimination and more importantly for this discussion the perceived one?
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThe head of Microsoft today is Indian, Qi Lu was, until recently, head of apps, Harry Shrum runs tech. Does the bamboo ceiling really exist in tech? Now, definitely for laowai working in China, there is a bamboo ceiling, almost all the senior leaders are going to be Chinese or Taiwanese :)
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoReading this article gives me the feeling that new technologies simply cannot get off the ground without central government planning and billions of dollars in taxpayer spending. I guess it's up to the Chinese government to decide whether China wants to keep testing this hypothesis over and over against all odds.
- Seanny123 9y agoThat's literally the thesis of “The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths” by Dr. Mazzucato. I wrote a summary if you're interested: https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-the-entrepreneurial-state-8fa47c4e8056 https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-the-entrepreneuria...
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- masthead 9y agoIMO, America will still be the leader in AI. The main difference between China and America is, China is more product focused, America is more math/logic focused.
- shriphani 9y agoThis is a simple function of the number of tinkerers available. Any ML project I've worked on has been a lot of tinkering - not unlike the sort of craftsmanship one associates with woodworking and blacksmithing. Tinkerers gave us Google, Facebook and of course modern civilization. Tinkerers need the Medici family equivalent. Silicon Valley has that in spades. The Chinese graduate students I met and knew brought this tinkerer's spirit and the American university atmosphere allowed them to unleash their potential (check out who features in the author lists of CMU, Stanford, MIT's papers at NIPS, ICML etc.). That state of mind and not a top-down approach is what we need. More Ben Franklins, Robert Hookes, and Issac Newtons; fewer 5-year planning commissions.
- remir 9y agoI think the term artificial intelligence is incorrect. What we're currently building is, IMO, artificial intellect. I view intelligence as the capacity to use resources, including the intellect, wisely and creatively. The current system we're building have no self-awareness and no will, so they cannot really be intelligent. If we want to build intelligent machines, we have to understand the architectures of the mind. We use memory as a sort of mental matter for the formulation of thoughts that we structure in a certain way to formulate ideas/concepts and then we go out and build things. We are builders because we are thinkers and we are conscious about being able to think. But what is a thought, really? What is consciousness? Look at the size of our brain next to the huge computers and data centers we're building for "AI". Our brain is small, yet was able to think about how to build these systems. We believe we're going to develop "artificial intelligence" by building massive computers and data centers. How absurd is that? Folks, to build intelligent machines, we have to build thinking machines and for this, we'll have to truly understand how the mind works and when we do this, I believe we'll be quite surprised.
- elementalest 9y ago> I think the term artificial intelligence is incorrect. What we're currently building is, IMO, artificial intellect. The rest of your comment contradicts this statement. Dictionary definition of intellect is "the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters". Dictionary definition for intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". Current AI has great difficulty in abstract matters/thought, let alone understanding something beyond simply a series of learned patterns. > If we want to build intelligent machines, we have to understand the architectures of the mind. We have intelligent machines now, many which outperform human capacity for specific tasks. If your talking about strong artificial intelligence, then I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but maybe it could go the other way. By developing strong AI, we can understand the architecture of the mind. Maybe strong AI can be developed with the intellect of a cat/dog, and that gives insight into the human mind. > We believe we're going to develop "artificial intelligence" by building massive computers and data centers. How absurd is that? No one who is knowledgeable about AI actually believes this (based on your definition of AI). > Folks, to build intelligent machines, we have to build thinking machines and for this, we'll have to truly understand how the mind works and when we do this, I believe we'll be quite surprised. You ask the question "what is a thought" above, then state we need to have thinking machines to make intelligent machines. One could argue machines today think, one could argue alphago 'thinks'. Using your definition of intelligence, we have AI today that meets your requirements. Wisdom is knowledge with good judgement and creativity is exploration with experimentation. There is plenty of academic work out there which covers all this.
- killin_dan 9y agoHow many times is this title going to be changed? I've seen it changed at least three times so far this evening. Titles should be locked to the article title to minimize confusion, imo.
- rustacean 9y agoI come from China, many people around me say that the reason of high proportion of Chinese authors in AI papers is many Chinese researchers just pour their "trash" into journals, it's a fake sense that China has become a major player in AI. U.S. and the other English researchers have done most of the essential/landmark jobs in AI, Chinese authors contribute less.
- esteves_ 9y agoChina is creating a safe space for western scientists free of Identity Politics. The trend will continue.
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