7 ms·

A Chinese Finance Giant That’s Secretly an AI Company (2017)

73 points by astdb 9y ago

erikb 9y ago
Well, let's separate between the marketing fluff and the actual value. Currently it's doing with AI what everybody else does: using more data to make more detailed predictions about numbered data (in this case money). That in itself is already great. If they achieve to recognize the car in a given picture, and maybe even the type of car, even though it's damaged, that will be really great. With that they may be better than the current best solution I've seen (FB's object recognition, which may not even be on as high a level as they present to us in a blog post). But estimating the damage, means recognizing something that is not a pattern. I doubt even classifying this into three categories like `~100bucks`, `~2000bucks`, `buynewone` would already be hard. I doubt that anybody could do it. And here's the point: Yes, Chinese IT companies are picking up speed. And I wish them all the success. But they have yet to show something that is really innovated by them. This idea is great, but they need to prove that they can do it before I will clap for their achievements.
- negamax 9y ago
  Who are you to clap for their achievements? There's a story about China's leap in science at the top. Maybe you should read it. Tunnel visions and echo chambers helps noone.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    That story talks about how china is pouring money into science to get to the top, it doesn’t actually talk about them already being there, the very opposite of tunnel vision.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    > Who are you to clap for their achievements? He's a skilled techie with a developed bullshit radar. That already puts him above an average layperson. Over the last 20 years, there's been untold amount of hype from different sources, each wave of which wanted the public to believe that this time it's different.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yters 9y ago
  Perhaps their culture of copying makes their innovators hold back for fear of their work being stolen?
- rubyfan 9y ago
  What you describe is actually hard, especially for upstarts. Legacy carriers and claim processing platforms are in good positions to deliver on AI claims given they have the image and settlement data. There are a few companies already doing similar, https://www.galaxy.ai https://www.galaxy.ai as an example there are a few others. From what I can tell, they are producing good guesstimates but not yet human level.
dis-sys 9y ago
The article is nothing else but a huge load of cheap marketing material. If they do have such AI expertise, how about just apply such skills to find out all those fake craps flooding taobao.com owned by the same group? Look at Ant Financial's credit score system known as the sesame score, it is just a huge disaster and embarrassment to the company. Last year, Ant Financial openly promoted the idea to let high sesame score users to exclusively date young college girls, you will only be allowed to contact/interact with those college girls if your sesame score is higher than 750. You have to question the overall integrity of the company and the team behind such ideas. At the beginning of 2018, users received notification from Ant Financial for viewing their 2017 yearly bill. Ant Financial forced all users who want to view that yearly bill to disclose their sesame score potentially to the rest part of the Alibaba group. No one from the top management team stepped down after the above two incidents, even when both of them hit national headline. Why? Because uncle Jack Ma's Ant Financial doesn't give a crap on such "tiny" incidents. With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for handling my personal data and finance. Luckily, there are other far better & more innovative Chinese competitors kicking Ant Financial's ass right now, e.g. Tencent.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > ...you will only be allowed to contact/interact with those college girls if your sesame score is higher than 750. You have to question the overall integrity of the company and the team behind such ideas. > With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for handling my personal data and finance. China is not America, they value societal stability over personal freedom. It's absolutely fine that you wouldn't trust this institution, but it's not made for you.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    You can still choose which companies you interact with. That doesn't prevent the government from getting your data, but it does mean that those companies won't be able to use it for their own gain. And I'm pretty sure the grandparent is well aware of the political situation in China, just take a look at their comment history.
vorg 9y ago
> Ant uses advanced machine-learning algorithms and custom programmable chips to crunch huge quantities of user data in a few seconds, to determine whether to grant a customer a loan Is this legal in the U.S. and E.U.? These AI systems can increase profits by saying who should get loans, but not why they should. If a U.S. business can't give clear criteria on how it decides on whether or not to grant loans, and instead allows an AI to decide based on any possible unknown criteria which could include ethnic profiling, then wouldn't they get sued soon enough?
- dis-sys 9y ago
  Your question is based on the assumption that they do reject loans on regular basis. The truth is they don't. They are so willing to blindly grant loans to the extent that the total amount lent out by them was found to be several times higher than the legal ceiling set by Chinese laws. The authority had to step in and force it to suspend such irresponsible lending. It was widely reported by various Chinese news outlets back in Jan 2018.
- jon-wood 9y ago
  My assumption here would be that it depends what data you allow the AI to consume. It’s definitely a fuzzy area though, even where you’ve got control over the data being rated on, for example there was recently some noise in the media about car insurance being more expensive if you have a hotmail.com email address.
- wjnc 9y ago
  A few thoughts (EU/NL): -It's hard to find out why you were denied a loan and full transparency is not required. You could ask for how the company has processed your personal details and try to find out but hard to know and hence hard to complain. Even GDPR doesn't change that a black box model for the modeller is incomprehensible to a customer. -Companies can to a certain degree operate as they want to. (I think that's fine too. Business should benefit both parties.) Discrimination is not always very clearcut and often on proper grounds (think risk-based). -In the Netherlands companies cannot automate denial of service / business. There has to be a human element to that. -Actuaries have long learned not to use for example names in modeling. That would be a good example of adding better risk insights through illegal discrimination (names give a good delineation of ethnical background, at least a for few generations).
vadimberman 9y ago
Like others mentioned, it's marketing fluff. The use of future tense and "in the near future" already makes it clear. And they have (drum roll) an equivalent of the FICO score! It uses "advanced machine learning algorithms"! There's really nothing related to privacy or societal implications, it's an advertorial. I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology Review. A bigger question from me, is China really that advanced? I hold a neutral position on this, but am now seeing a consistent pattern of articles hyping Chinese cookie-cutter tech (or stuff which is bigger) sounding like Cold War era Soviet propaganda. If they really had some kind of grandiose tech achievements, why bother with this?
- govg 9y ago
  Maybe not exactly what you seek, but Microsoft Research China does some really state of the art work in vision. Baidu (that Andrew Ng was affiliated with) also seems to have made really big strides with stuff like speech recognition. There are some serious credentials backing people working there, but all the news I've heard does come out from articles that seem to have a lot of hype behind it.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I saw some interesting papers from Huawei recently.
- gumby 9y ago
  > I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology Review. In case you didn't realize, the "MIT" technology review has nothing to do with MIT. It used to be basically the alumni magazine (if you're an alum you get it for free with an alum section bound into the back -- does anyone actually pay for the magazine?). A few years back a company took the magazine over and added "MIT" to the front. They basically want to be Wired, so advertorial content is prime content.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    I realise it's not affiliated with the MIT but I've been reading it for years and it's a respectable publication, normally immune to bullshit.
geeeek 9y ago
I have a good credit record on Ant, and I just come USA last Fall, really feel the inconvenient payment here, I personality don't trust any third party financial institutions, whether physical bank or online financial company, and some behaviors the ant performed on its customers, I cant agree. Well one fact I can tell about is the expo in my university before I came to USA, the AI technology shows during the expo suprised me, although the mechanism behind problem simple, well in China senario, the nlp, characters recognition is more difficult due to it's culture. I happened to check out it's individual loans oneline, based its credit system, everyone has a credit number, I can lend my money to thers, it's like customer to customer, it's more like the blockchain idea (decentralize), I like it, we don't need bank or anything other agents to operate for us, although the credit number can be compromied by Ant, the idea is real, and used by Chinese people, it's happening, it's a start. I know here is a different country, different system, basically payment dominated by cash and credit card, which I was really not used to, no offense, living here I feel more traditional regarding payment and shopping. Of course there are so many things good and better than China, but China is so big, there are technologies advanced indeed. Back to Ant, there are certain ways they promote their products I don't like, the truth is they do innovate Chinese shopping, loans and financial payments, and mostly it's working well, it's more align to the society develop.

73 points by astdb 9y ago

Well, let's separate between the marketing fluff and the actual value. Currently it's doing with AI what everybody else does: using more data to make more detailed predictions about numbered data (in this case money). That in itself is already great. If they achieve to recognize the car in a given picture, and maybe even the type of car, even though it's damaged, that will be really great. With that they may be better than the current best solution I've seen (FB's object recognition, which may not even be on as high a level as they present to us in a blog post). But estimating the damage, means recognizing something that is not a pattern. I doubt even classifying this into three categories like `~100bucks`, `~2000bucks`, `buynewone` would already be hard. I doubt that anybody could do it. And here's the point: Yes, Chinese IT companies are picking up speed. And I wish them all the success. But they have yet to show something that is really innovated by them. This idea is great, but they need to prove that they can do it before I will clap for their achievements.

negamax 9y ago
Who are you to clap for their achievements? There's a story about China's leap in science at the top. Maybe you should read it. Tunnel visions and echo chambers helps noone.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  That story talks about how china is pouring money into science to get to the top, it doesn’t actually talk about them already being there, the very opposite of tunnel vision.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  > Who are you to clap for their achievements? He's a skilled techie with a developed bullshit radar. That already puts him above an average layperson. Over the last 20 years, there's been untold amount of hype from different sources, each wave of which wanted the public to believe that this time it's different.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yters 9y ago
Perhaps their culture of copying makes their innovators hold back for fear of their work being stolen?
rubyfan 9y ago
What you describe is actually hard, especially for upstarts. Legacy carriers and claim processing platforms are in good positions to deliver on AI claims given they have the image and settlement data. There are a few companies already doing similar, https://www.galaxy.ai https://www.galaxy.ai as an example there are a few others. From what I can tell, they are producing good guesstimates but not yet human level.

dis-sys 9y ago

The article is nothing else but a huge load of cheap marketing material. If they do have such AI expertise, how about just apply such skills to find out all those fake craps flooding taobao.com owned by the same group? Look at Ant Financial's credit score system known as the sesame score, it is just a huge disaster and embarrassment to the company. Last year, Ant Financial openly promoted the idea to let high sesame score users to exclusively date young college girls, you will only be allowed to contact/interact with those college girls if your sesame score is higher than 750. You have to question the overall integrity of the company and the team behind such ideas. At the beginning of 2018, users received notification from Ant Financial for viewing their 2017 yearly bill. Ant Financial forced all users who want to view that yearly bill to disclose their sesame score potentially to the rest part of the Alibaba group. No one from the top management team stepped down after the above two incidents, even when both of them hit national headline. Why? Because uncle Jack Ma's Ant Financial doesn't give a crap on such "tiny" incidents. With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for handling my personal data and finance. Luckily, there are other far better & more innovative Chinese competitors kicking Ant Financial's ass right now, e.g. Tencent.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> ...you will only be allowed to contact/interact with those college girls if your sesame score is higher than 750. You have to question the overall integrity of the company and the team behind such ideas. > With such track record, AI or no AI, I wouldn't trust such a company for handling my personal data and finance. China is not America, they value societal stability over personal freedom. It's absolutely fine that you wouldn't trust this institution, but it's not made for you.
- yorwba 9y ago
  You can still choose which companies you interact with. That doesn't prevent the government from getting your data, but it does mean that those companies won't be able to use it for their own gain. And I'm pretty sure the grandparent is well aware of the political situation in China, just take a look at their comment history.

vorg 9y ago

> Ant uses advanced machine-learning algorithms and custom programmable chips to crunch huge quantities of user data in a few seconds, to determine whether to grant a customer a loan Is this legal in the U.S. and E.U.? These AI systems can increase profits by saying who should get loans, but not why they should. If a U.S. business can't give clear criteria on how it decides on whether or not to grant loans, and instead allows an AI to decide based on any possible unknown criteria which could include ethnic profiling, then wouldn't they get sued soon enough?

dis-sys 9y ago
Your question is based on the assumption that they do reject loans on regular basis. The truth is they don't. They are so willing to blindly grant loans to the extent that the total amount lent out by them was found to be several times higher than the legal ceiling set by Chinese laws. The authority had to step in and force it to suspend such irresponsible lending. It was widely reported by various Chinese news outlets back in Jan 2018.
jon-wood 9y ago
My assumption here would be that it depends what data you allow the AI to consume. It’s definitely a fuzzy area though, even where you’ve got control over the data being rated on, for example there was recently some noise in the media about car insurance being more expensive if you have a hotmail.com email address.
wjnc 9y ago
A few thoughts (EU/NL): -It's hard to find out why you were denied a loan and full transparency is not required. You could ask for how the company has processed your personal details and try to find out but hard to know and hence hard to complain. Even GDPR doesn't change that a black box model for the modeller is incomprehensible to a customer. -Companies can to a certain degree operate as they want to. (I think that's fine too. Business should benefit both parties.) Discrimination is not always very clearcut and often on proper grounds (think risk-based). -In the Netherlands companies cannot automate denial of service / business. There has to be a human element to that. -Actuaries have long learned not to use for example names in modeling. That would be a good example of adding better risk insights through illegal discrimination (names give a good delineation of ethnical background, at least a for few generations).

vadimberman 9y ago

Like others mentioned, it's marketing fluff. The use of future tense and "in the near future" already makes it clear. And they have (drum roll) an equivalent of the FICO score! It uses "advanced machine learning algorithms"! There's really nothing related to privacy or societal implications, it's an advertorial. I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology Review. A bigger question from me, is China really that advanced? I hold a neutral position on this, but am now seeing a consistent pattern of articles hyping Chinese cookie-cutter tech (or stuff which is bigger) sounding like Cold War era Soviet propaganda. If they really had some kind of grandiose tech achievements, why bother with this?

govg 9y ago
Maybe not exactly what you seek, but Microsoft Research China does some really state of the art work in vision. Baidu (that Andrew Ng was affiliated with) also seems to have made really big strides with stuff like speech recognition. There are some serious credentials backing people working there, but all the news I've heard does come out from articles that seem to have a lot of hype behind it.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I saw some interesting papers from Huawei recently.
gumby 9y ago
> I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology Review. In case you didn't realize, the "MIT" technology review has nothing to do with MIT. It used to be basically the alumni magazine (if you're an alum you get it for free with an alum section bound into the back -- does anyone actually pay for the magazine?). A few years back a company took the magazine over and added "MIT" to the front. They basically want to be Wired, so advertorial content is prime content.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  I realise it's not affiliated with the MIT but I've been reading it for years and it's a respectable publication, normally immune to bullshit.

geeeek 9y ago

I have a good credit record on Ant, and I just come USA last Fall, really feel the inconvenient payment here, I personality don't trust any third party financial institutions, whether physical bank or online financial company, and some behaviors the ant performed on its customers, I cant agree. Well one fact I can tell about is the expo in my university before I came to USA, the AI technology shows during the expo suprised me, although the mechanism behind problem simple, well in China senario, the nlp, characters recognition is more difficult due to it's culture. I happened to check out it's individual loans oneline, based its credit system, everyone has a credit number, I can lend my money to thers, it's like customer to customer, it's more like the blockchain idea (decentralize), I like it, we don't need bank or anything other agents to operate for us, although the credit number can be compromied by Ant, the idea is real, and used by Chinese people, it's happening, it's a start. I know here is a different country, different system, basically payment dominated by cash and credit card, which I was really not used to, no offense, living here I feel more traditional regarding payment and shopping. Of course there are so many things good and better than China, but China is so big, there are technologies advanced indeed. Back to Ant, there are certain ways they promote their products I don't like, the truth is they do innovate Chinese shopping, loans and financial payments, and mostly it's working well, it's more align to the society develop.