16 ms·

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

71 points by nopinsight 9y ago

alexnewman 9y ago
i read the research. chinese contributions are amazing but it’s a world wide phenomena
polskibus 9y 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?
- seanmcdirmid 9y 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.
  - Barrin92 9y 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.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very aspirational. I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that it led directly to the 2nd AI winter. It also correlates nicely with other economic excesses (like China's problematic property bubble). China still has a problem with attracting world-class talent, mainly because of their environment (great firewall, still way too wicked pollution). There are more Chinese working on ML in Silicon Valley then probably all foreigners working in tech in China. So if ML is a talent game, then I don't see how China will be able to win that in the near term, even with all their local human resources.
      - Barrin92 9y ago
        I don't believe that ML is a talent game at all. I think ML is a data and policy game. There's a lot of talk about AI braininess but from a theoretical standpoint there isn't much new to the currently commercially used ML products. The only thing that's changed over the last five years is data. Backpropagation is decades old. And on the data and policy side China has hugely favourable conditions. I think we're making a great mistake if we're over-hyping the role of talent.
- otakucode 9y 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.
pedrosorio 9y 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 9y ago
  Russia is probably doping their participants though.
- hux_ 9y ago
  After their pioneering work in fake news and social media fuckery the Russians plan to focus next on FI or fake intelligence. Trump will win the next Go world championship and put into question all intelligence as we know it.
- loverofthings 9y 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 9y 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.
  - pedrosorio 9y 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).
- 9y ago
WheelsAtLarge 9y 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.
- rayiner 9y 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.
- d0100 9y ago
  > China's will to move forward, at the expense of countless bodies, is astonishingly great FTFY
yusee 9y 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 9y ago
  This. What is worrying me is core services seem to perform worst than before like GMail, but even search or YouTube.
  - propman 9y 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.
- joshuamorton 9y 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 9y ago
    Maybe Gmail was a has example. How about the Google play store?
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      I interact with the play store relatively infrequently, so I don't know what you mean. Would you mind elaborating?
helthanatos 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
  - pedrosorio 9y ago
    > China has billions of people Calm down, it hasn't even reached 1.5 billion yet.
chvid 9y 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.
- deleted 9y ago
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- Spooky23 9y 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 9y ago
Not sure about "will surpass". Possibly the inflection point already happened. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china-artificial-intelligence/516615/ 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.
yusee 9y 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.
- deleted 9y ago
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rayiner 9y 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 9y 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.
olympus 9y 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 9y ago
  What US govt investments are you referring to?
  - olympus 9y 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 9y 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-e46f43c5825d https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c58...
kozikow 9y 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 9y ago
No doubt given a giant step ahead by open source initiatives such as TensorFlow, ironically.
kore 9y 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 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china
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nopinsight 9y 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/ 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&vision&mlmining&nlp&world 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 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 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 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_(China) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial-intelligence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-ar...
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otakucode 9y ago
Eric Schmidt also thinks that the rich should determine human culture because they're somehow superior to the rest of the human race. He also thinks that if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide (yet he won't post his masturbation fantasies to twitter for unstated reasons that we can only assume are due to him having done something very wrong). He's full of bad ideas, and I can't imagine why anyone would listen to anything he has to say.
aje403 9y ago
We’re way ahead in cryptocurrency startups. We should definitely take that into account.

71 points by nopinsight 9y ago

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

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?

seanmcdirmid 9y 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.
- Barrin92 9y 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.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very aspirational. I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that it led directly to the 2nd AI winter. It also correlates nicely with other economic excesses (like China's problematic property bubble). China still has a problem with attracting world-class talent, mainly because of their environment (great firewall, still way too wicked pollution). There are more Chinese working on ML in Silicon Valley then probably all foreigners working in tech in China. So if ML is a talent game, then I don't see how China will be able to win that in the near term, even with all their local human resources.
    - Barrin92 9y ago
      I don't believe that ML is a talent game at all. I think ML is a data and policy game. There's a lot of talk about AI braininess but from a theoretical standpoint there isn't much new to the currently commercially used ML products. The only thing that's changed over the last five years is data. Backpropagation is decades old. And on the data and policy side China has hugely favourable conditions. I think we're making a great mistake if we're over-hyping the role of talent.
otakucode 9y 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.

pedrosorio 9y 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 9y ago
Russia is probably doping their participants though.
hux_ 9y ago
After their pioneering work in fake news and social media fuckery the Russians plan to focus next on FI or fake intelligence. Trump will win the next Go world championship and put into question all intelligence as we know it.
loverofthings 9y 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 9y 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.
- pedrosorio 9y 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).
9y ago

WheelsAtLarge 9y 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.

rayiner 9y 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.
d0100 9y ago
> China's will to move forward, at the expense of countless bodies, is astonishingly great FTFY

yusee 9y 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 9y ago
This. What is worrying me is core services seem to perform worst than before like GMail, but even search or YouTube.
- propman 9y 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.
joshuamorton 9y 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 9y ago
  Maybe Gmail was a has example. How about the Google play store?
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    I interact with the play store relatively infrequently, so I don't know what you mean. Would you mind elaborating?

helthanatos 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
- pedrosorio 9y ago
  > China has billions of people Calm down, it hasn't even reached 1.5 billion yet.

chvid 9y 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.

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Spooky23 9y 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 9y ago

Not sure about "will surpass". Possibly the inflection point already happened. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china-artificial-intelligence/516615/ 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.

yusee 9y 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.

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rayiner 9y 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 9y 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.

olympus 9y 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 9y ago
What US govt investments are you referring to?
- olympus 9y 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 9y 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-e46f43c5825d https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c58...

kozikow 9y 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 9y ago

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

kore 9y 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 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china

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nopinsight 9y 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/ 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&vision&mlmining&nlp&world 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 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 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 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_(China) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial-intelligence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-ar...

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otakucode 9y ago

Eric Schmidt also thinks that the rich should determine human culture because they're somehow superior to the rest of the human race. He also thinks that if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide (yet he won't post his masturbation fantasies to twitter for unstated reasons that we can only assume are due to him having done something very wrong). He's full of bad ideas, and I can't imagine why anyone would listen to anything he has to say.

aje403 9y ago

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