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

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...