8 ms·

Deciphering China’s AI Dream

123 points by hunglee2 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
astebbin 9y ago
Not loading for me. Cached on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.o... EDIT: Hrm, guess it only cached the abstract.
- polar 9y ago
  The Wayback Machine doesn't appear to have the PDF, but the direct link worked for me: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chin... Mirror: https://archive.fo/QhRnC https://archive.fo/QhRnC
  - kercker 9y ago
    I uploaded the PDF into Dropbox, and shared the file at the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas...
osrec 9y ago
Wow, the entire fhi.ox.ac.uk subdomain is unreachable. I thought Oxford uni servers would have been able to cope with a little traffic surge!
- Rattled 9y ago
  I hope it is just a traffic surge, not a great cannon.
John_KZ 9y ago
The most worrying trend I note is how closely China and the West are when it comes to the use of AI and data collection for the manipulation and control of the masses. The financial system is different. In the West, there's no central authority requesting what needs to be done, but small and big companies are allowed to go crazy with user data, as long as they provide access to government agencies too. In China, the whole thing is managed by governmental entities, but it functions strikingly similar. The Chinese also lack a lot of the tact and PR management that western companies are so good at - but the differences aren't that big in the surveilance. One other key difference is that the Chinese aren't afraid to prosecute people based on that data, while in the West we still have some due process, but the future plans aren't looking good.
nabla9 9y ago
History does not repeat itself but it rhymes. Strong rhymes from the 80's and 90's when Japan was the boogieman. Replace Japan with China to update into the present moment. 1) Fear of Japanese AI was real in the 80's. The fifth generation computers (massive parallelism with prolog programs)[1]. 2) Fear of Japanese buying the rest of the world [2] and unfair trade tactics. 3) Trump attacking Japan for trade and considering a presidential run with trade war and tariffs [3]. 4) The war with Japan is inevitable [4]. 5) Under all this Japan had 'demographic time bomb' and real estate boom reaching the maximum. China will undoubtedly face many of the same problems as Japan did, but the scales are different (both time and magnitude). China has still at least two decades to go. The country is still undergoing urbanization and has to fit over 100 million people into cities. While Chinese growth can't be as high as in last decades, their growth will still outpace the West for a long time. It's very unlikely that China just fizzles and stays paralyzed for more than a decade like Japan did. Either Chinese solve their problems or the problems will destabilize China internally. --- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer [2]: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-spree-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyin... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-trumps-one-solid-stance-a-hard-line-on-trade/2018/03/07/4b1ed250-2172-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html?utm_term=.591792e550ca https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-tr... [4]: The Coming War With Japan by George Friedman , Meredith Lebard https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0312058365 https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0...
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  It would be ironic if the fourth AI winter came about because China over invested in AI. China's real estate boom has already hit peak Japan.
  - nabla9 9y ago
    I'm certain that AI business will plateau and there will be yet another AI winter without new big breakthroughs in fundamental research. We are currently living in a era where the results from Hinton & Canadian Mafia are still begin adopted and refined. It's just alternating layers of affine transformations and nonlinearity with lots of tricks and improved routing. There needs to be fundamental theoretical breakthrough in every decade or so, and not just refinements and new applications. Hinton made his "What is wrong with convolutional neural nets" speech years ago "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE I believe that Hinton's capsule networks type attempts are what we need more. They may not deliver immediately impressive results because fundamental research involves lots of setbacks.
clvcooke 9y ago
Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking and creativity. The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small corner of applied science tells me otherwise. Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad). Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the mathematical understanding to build something novel.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  There are plenty of creative people in china that retain their creativity inspite of the rigid Chinese educational system. Yes, some kids will get beat down into obedience, but China has a lot of people, so some won’t. The bigger problem is just talent based: china isn’t taking much advantage of non chinese talent, while America is. The American talent pool for top tier talent is simply much larger than china’s despite having a much smaller population.
  - clvcooke 9y ago
    I hadn't thought about talent pool and very good point. In my mind even if China did want to take advantage of this they may have issues due to their reputation (I for one would not want to live/work in china due to their blatent disrepect for IP). Follow up: Do those people then get encouraged to continue to foster their creativity within the system? Does the government, upon seeing that someone "withstood" their education change their approach and allow them to continue to explore?
nopinsight 9y ago
This is news to me. Will it likely affect Nvidia in any significant way? From p.18 of the report: "What is new in the hardware driver is that Chinese tech giants and unicorn startups are competitive with some of the world’s leading companies in designing AI chips. For instance, Chinese company Cambricon, a statebacked startup valued at $1 billion, has developed chips that are six times faster than the standard GPUs for deep learning applications and use a fraction of the power consumption.65 Moreover, equipped with a new “neural processing unit,” Huawei has arguably overtaken Apple in mobile AI chips.66"
- Nokinside 9y ago
  Nvidia will face more competition in the future, but it has technological edge. So far Nvidia has build microarchitectures that are generic. They just put tensor cores, F64, F32, F16 units and 8-bit inference support into the same GPU. They are used in HPC, graphics, DL inference and training. That's four different domains. I suspect that in the future Nvidia builds 2-3 different microarchitectures. One for HPC + graphics. One for DL training. One for DL inference.
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    Right, I wonder just how specialized these chips are. There are still changes in modeling and architecture coming hot off the research presses. It's easy-ish to hard code a specific architecture in your Verilog and claim massive efficiency improvements. While AI is still very much in the research stage, general-purpose is what really matters.
EGreg 9y ago
Here is what I am worried about: as China takes more and more steps to become authoritarian -- CCTV cameras everywhere and recently banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough -- aren't they a few steps away from ushering in an AI-overseen human population, tracking everyone's actions and gradually increasing the amount of control over the population until there is nothing anyone can do, including the politicians? There MAY be one or more humans at the top, but it might just be completely run by itself in the end. My worry is that it might have some serious problems from the AI not understanding human needs. As one AI researcher said, the temptation to try it just too sweet. And China's motto of already "once untrustworthy, always restricted" for the social credit score system isn't very encouraging.
- Nokinside 9y ago
  Only thing I fear from Chinese authoritarian AI surveillance system is that it turns out to be successful and efficient. If it can control people efficiently but has less negative externalizes than traditional authoritarianism, it will eventually spread outside China. Resilient, stable and productive authoritarian system would turn the tables between liberal democracies and the rest of the world. It would be a pivotal moment in human history.
- fspeech 9y ago
  "banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough" This is a myth created by inaccurate reporting. For details on what the policy is exactly see my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551
vadimberman 9y ago
> By 2020, China’s AI industry will be “in line” with the most advanced countries, with a core AI industry gross output exceeding RMB 150 billion (USD 22.5 billion) and AI-related industry gross output exceeding RMB 1 trillion (USD 150.8 billion) And I'm confident the goal will be reached. Incidentally, much of the software that today is classified as "just software" will be called "AI". Not that it's different from elsewhere, of course (I saw screenscraping being called "AI"), it's just there are government incentives to do so.

123 points by hunglee2 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Not loading for me. Cached on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180318140130/https://www.fhi.o... EDIT: Hrm, guess it only cached the abstract.

polar 9y ago
The Wayback Machine doesn't appear to have the PDF, but the direct link worked for me: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chin... Mirror: https://archive.fo/QhRnC https://archive.fo/QhRnC
- kercker 9y ago
  I uploaded the PDF into Dropbox, and shared the file at the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dm9eew6jf1t42wp/Deciphering_Chinas...

osrec 9y ago

Wow, the entire fhi.ox.ac.uk subdomain is unreachable. I thought Oxford uni servers would have been able to cope with a little traffic surge!

Rattled 9y ago
I hope it is just a traffic surge, not a great cannon.

John_KZ 9y ago

The most worrying trend I note is how closely China and the West are when it comes to the use of AI and data collection for the manipulation and control of the masses. The financial system is different. In the West, there's no central authority requesting what needs to be done, but small and big companies are allowed to go crazy with user data, as long as they provide access to government agencies too. In China, the whole thing is managed by governmental entities, but it functions strikingly similar. The Chinese also lack a lot of the tact and PR management that western companies are so good at - but the differences aren't that big in the surveilance. One other key difference is that the Chinese aren't afraid to prosecute people based on that data, while in the West we still have some due process, but the future plans aren't looking good.

nabla9 9y ago

History does not repeat itself but it rhymes. Strong rhymes from the 80's and 90's when Japan was the boogieman. Replace Japan with China to update into the present moment. 1) Fear of Japanese AI was real in the 80's. The fifth generation computers (massive parallelism with prolog programs)[1]. 2) Fear of Japanese buying the rest of the world [2] and unfair trade tactics. 3) Trump attacking Japan for trade and considering a presidential run with trade war and tariffs [3]. 4) The war with Japan is inevitable [4]. 5) Under all this Japan had 'demographic time bomb' and real estate boom reaching the maximum. China will undoubtedly face many of the same problems as Japan did, but the scales are different (both time and magnitude). China has still at least two decades to go. The country is still undergoing urbanization and has to fit over 100 million people into cities. While Chinese growth can't be as high as in last decades, their growth will still outpace the West for a long time. It's very unlikely that China just fizzles and stays paralyzed for more than a decade like Japan did. Either Chinese solve their problems or the problems will destabilize China internally. --- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer [2]: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-spree-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyin... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-trumps-one-solid-stance-a-hard-line-on-trade/2018/03/07/4b1ed250-2172-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html?utm_term=.591792e550ca https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-tr... [4]: The Coming War With Japan by George Friedman , Meredith Lebard https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0312058365 https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0...

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
It would be ironic if the fourth AI winter came about because China over invested in AI. China's real estate boom has already hit peak Japan.
- nabla9 9y ago
  I'm certain that AI business will plateau and there will be yet another AI winter without new big breakthroughs in fundamental research. We are currently living in a era where the results from Hinton & Canadian Mafia are still begin adopted and refined. It's just alternating layers of affine transformations and nonlinearity with lots of tricks and improved routing. There needs to be fundamental theoretical breakthrough in every decade or so, and not just refinements and new applications. Hinton made his "What is wrong with convolutional neural nets" speech years ago "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE I believe that Hinton's capsule networks type attempts are what we need more. They may not deliver immediately impressive results because fundamental research involves lots of setbacks.

clvcooke 9y ago

Although not explicitly what the report is focussed on, this resurfaces my, perhaps mislead, hope that AI will be the field to prove that the Chinese style of eduation will prove unfruitful. As someone attempting to work in this field right now I intepret it as something that although on the surface is highly mathematical/statistical at its base still rests on critical thinking and creativity. The latter attribute, creativity, is something I have always thought was necessary to foster with freedom in thought and expression, two things I see incompatible with the authoritarian system currently in place in China. Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will. However, my personal experience working with it, and experimenting with improvement in my own small corner of applied science tells me otherwise. Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad). Edit: I don't want my comment on math to imply that there is no creativity within mathematics. I've gone through too many heavy math courses to believe that. I'm instead trying to say that there is a place, even beyond mathematics, for creativity and intuition, where you don't need the mathematical understanding to build something novel.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
There are plenty of creative people in china that retain their creativity inspite of the rigid Chinese educational system. Yes, some kids will get beat down into obedience, but China has a lot of people, so some won’t. The bigger problem is just talent based: china isn’t taking much advantage of non chinese talent, while America is. The American talent pool for top tier talent is simply much larger than china’s despite having a much smaller population.
- clvcooke 9y ago
  I hadn't thought about talent pool and very good point. In my mind even if China did want to take advantage of this they may have issues due to their reputation (I for one would not want to live/work in china due to their blatent disrepect for IP). Follow up: Do those people then get encouraged to continue to foster their creativity within the system? Does the government, upon seeing that someone "withstood" their education change their approach and allow them to continue to explore?

nopinsight 9y ago

This is news to me. Will it likely affect Nvidia in any significant way? From p.18 of the report: "What is new in the hardware driver is that Chinese tech giants and unicorn startups are competitive with some of the world’s leading companies in designing AI chips. For instance, Chinese company Cambricon, a statebacked startup valued at $1 billion, has developed chips that are six times faster than the standard GPUs for deep learning applications and use a fraction of the power consumption.65 Moreover, equipped with a new “neural processing unit,” Huawei has arguably overtaken Apple in mobile AI chips.66"

Nokinside 9y ago
Nvidia will face more competition in the future, but it has technological edge. So far Nvidia has build microarchitectures that are generic. They just put tensor cores, F64, F32, F16 units and 8-bit inference support into the same GPU. They are used in HPC, graphics, DL inference and training. That's four different domains. I suspect that in the future Nvidia builds 2-3 different microarchitectures. One for HPC + graphics. One for DL training. One for DL inference.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Right, I wonder just how specialized these chips are. There are still changes in modeling and architecture coming hot off the research presses. It's easy-ish to hard code a specific architecture in your Verilog and claim massive efficiency improvements. While AI is still very much in the research stage, general-purpose is what really matters.

EGreg 9y ago

Here is what I am worried about: as China takes more and more steps to become authoritarian -- CCTV cameras everywhere and recently banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough -- aren't they a few steps away from ushering in an AI-overseen human population, tracking everyone's actions and gradually increasing the amount of control over the population until there is nothing anyone can do, including the politicians? There MAY be one or more humans at the top, but it might just be completely run by itself in the end. My worry is that it might have some serious problems from the AI not understanding human needs. As one AI researcher said, the temptation to try it just too sweet. And China's motto of already "once untrustworthy, always restricted" for the social credit score system isn't very encouraging.

Nokinside 9y ago
Only thing I fear from Chinese authoritarian AI surveillance system is that it turns out to be successful and efficient. If it can control people efficiently but has less negative externalizes than traditional authoritarianism, it will eventually spread outside China. Resilient, stable and productive authoritarian system would turn the tables between liberal democracies and the rest of the world. It would be a pivotal moment in human history.
fspeech 9y ago
"banning people from trains and planes if their citizen score is not high enough" This is a myth created by inaccurate reporting. For details on what the policy is exactly see my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16604551

vadimberman 9y ago

> By 2020, China’s AI industry will be “in line” with the most advanced countries, with a core AI industry gross output exceeding RMB 150 billion (USD 22.5 billion) and AI-related industry gross output exceeding RMB 1 trillion (USD 150.8 billion) And I'm confident the goal will be reached. Incidentally, much of the software that today is classified as "just software" will be called "AI". Not that it's different from elsewhere, of course (I saw screenscraping being called "AI"), it's just there are government incentives to do so.