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China’s SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, closes $620M round
- alex_young 8y agoThis tech enables the Chinese social credit system. Pretty dark use for AI IMHO.
- collinf 8y agoWow, for anyone who hasn't read into this, check out the Wikipedia page[1]. Feels like sci-fi dystopian futures are closer everyday. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
- Retric 8y agoI think we are already in a Dystonian future and people are distracted and don't notice. Vast prison population and byzantine court system, Declining life expectancy, Horrific traffic, Surveillance state including 24/7 location tracking, Births below replacement rate, Systemic Unemployment and Age Discrimination, etc Individually they don't seem bad until one of them bites you. But, the world is a very nasty place for many people.
- navaati 8y ago- Vast prison population - Declining life expectancy - Horrific traffic These 3 at least are a very american-centric view of things. In our good old Europe (excluding UK) things are way better. Now, some things on your list are universal :/…
- williamdclt 8y agoNot sure "Births below replacement rate" is dystopian, "uncontrolled and unsustainable population growth" definitely is. Sadly, what we have is the latter
- kinsomo 8y ago> "uncontrolled and unsustainable population growth" definitely is. Sadly, what we have is the latter No we don't. IIRC, birth rates are dropping everywhere and the world population in on track to plateau mid-century before it declines.
- cristianpascu 8y agoAnd also "uncontrolled and unsustainable" living standards growth. When you have huge portions of world population wanting to live like in the west, and not only for basic stuff like hygiene and schooling. And meanwhile people are decrying that we're too many, too many people are born. Which basically translates to more women should take more pills. Children of men, the movie, comes to mind.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThis is completely tangential, but adds to the sort of vision of the world on that stage. Specifically your reference to how hard the world can be for some people. It's a brilliant and beautifully photographed documentary about the people who ride the cross-Saharan train, sometimes as the core of their livelihood, and the people who rely on this older technology just to be able to eat. It's titled The Mauritania Railway: Backbone of the Sahara https://vimeo.com/225516052 https://vimeo.com/225516052 edit: I just can't recommend it enough. Just watching a few moments already has me sucked in To me, the whole present situation seems much closer to the story line in Elysium. I've worked in factories like the protagonist. It's not as distant as it can seem.
- nimmer 8y ago> Births below replacement rate This is the opposite of a problem. Overpopulation is a huge global issue. > Vast prison population and byzantine court system > Systemic Unemployment and Age Discrimination You forgot discrimination based on ethnicity, nationality and, most notably, wealth.
- kazinator 8y agoBirth below replacement rate being a problem is usually in the context of the problem of "us dwindling versus them proliferating".
- Retric 8y agoEvery large ethnic group is at least slightly below replacement rate in the USA. Some more than others but it's not a good sign suggesting that people are generally struggling. PS: Male:Female gender imbalance at birth + early deaths is why the replacement rate is over 2.0 lifetime births per woman.
- KineticLensman 8y agoThe future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed’. William Gibson
- vertexFarm 8y agoOh yeah, this is dystopia baby. For many, at least. Like everything, it's probably on a spectrum and it's probably degenerative over time. Lots of people will point to how prosperous we are and how things like premature death and disease are at record-low rates throughout all of history. I think we're in a nice little bubble of time where we're surfing on a false economy, borrowing from our future selves in a very unsustainable way which artificially makes our current situation look just about fine. But eventually we're going to use up this runway. At risk of mixing metaphors haphazardly, this is sort of the calm before the storm. As climate change starts ramping up this shit is going to get very uncomfortably real, and lots of these nightmare dystopia-technologies we're currently developing will probably start seeing even greater mass usage. I'm typically not the apocalyptic type, and I recognize that most members of every generation that's ever lived have believed that they were one of the last generations. But our universe has shown us that eventually everything ends, so realistically there will someday be a generation which makes this assumption correctly. I don't think we're necessarily they, but we might be their grandparents or great-grandparents. There's a non-trivial chance that we've already passed the point of no return on climate change. We've almost casually walked into the maw of the great filter already--it just hasn't chomped down on us yet.
- rightos 8y agoWow, given this and the AI system it sounds way too much like Psycho-Pass. Pretty horrific indeed.
- sanlyx 8y agoI read the Wikipedia entry and I immediately thought of Sibyl. It's horrifying and quite sad knowing that many people predicted this long ago and we did nothing but rejoice for the literary excellence of their works (e.g. 1984)
- lev99 8y agoMaybe it's the communist ideals, or maybe it's the reality of governing over one hundred cities with populations over one million, but personal liberty is valued less than social order and economic advancement in the Chinese goverment. I think it's more dystopian for all governments to have the same ideals and policies than for different governments to have different ideals and policies. It's okay that China is different.
- ativzzz 8y agoMass surveillance is quite possibly the most practical large-scale application of modern AI.
- JTbane 8y ago"Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance." -JC Denton, Deus Ex China is on track to have the most advanced systems of mass surveillance in the world.
- Numberwang 8y agoI think its a good system. We should set something similar up.
- codemac 8y agoCan you provide any details as to what you define as good, and how this system reflects that?
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Above all on flamebait topics. Unsubstantive comments on flamebait topics = de facto trolling.
- Numberwang 8y agoHow can't this be a legitimate opinion?
- mark_edward 8y agoWho needs social credit scores telling you what to think when you have HN!
- dang 8y agoThat's beside the point. The point is that the comment contains no more information than "yay flamebait". The signal/noise ratio of HN comments needs to be much higher. Unsubstantive comment + flamebait topic = de facto trolling. By de facto I mean whether you intended to troll or not. We can't read your mind, but we know a lot about the likely effects of such a post. Moreover, you have a history of doing this, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102050. Please don't do it any more.
- Numberwang 8y agoSo you are saying HN has taken an active stance against Islam?
- zitterbewegung 8y agoI keep on wondering if the Social Credit system is just for parallel reconstruction of events or not (or maybe both). Also, people have tweeted at the technology in action. https://twitter.com/rob_schmitz/status/981334160924082177 https://twitter.com/rob_schmitz/status/981334160924082177 https://twitter.com/rob_schmitz/status/981425263987843072 https://twitter.com/rob_schmitz/status/981425263987843072 is a good demo of what they appear to be doing For the first one they are doing object classification & identification in realtime. The second one is identifying crowds using a heatmap.
- themodelplumber 8y agoI don't mean to play it down, but honestly classifying objects and identifying crowds don't seem like super valuable outcomes from such a huge investment. I guess I expected something like "persistently label and narrow down the definition of an object over the span of multiple occasions" or "identify the intent or demeanor of a crowd".
- zitterbewegung 8y agoDo you realize if you did this at scale how much faster you could look through recordings ? And that this is a manual process currently? Also, they are just starting out .
- nunya213 8y agoThey are using this to routinely pull wanted criminals out of crowds using facial recognition. Seems valuable especially to somewhere like China that likes to grab particular people.
- craigsmansion 8y agoYes. This Chinese social credit score undermines the free market in social credit scores, leading to inefficiency and lost opportunities.
- Barrin92 8y agoGiven that most of the value of the system is derived from centralisation of data and applying the exact same standard to every citizen to ensure comparability the free market in this case would not increase efficiency, in the same way healthcare markets don't. Multiple actors would just increase bureaucratic overhead.
- paradite 8y agoI've seen quite a lot of criticism against the social credit system. But to me it it just crime history and (financial) credit history mined from big data and combined into a centralized system. What's particularly bad about the system per se, without getting into the arguments specific to Chinese politics?
- kinsomo 8y ago> I've seen quite a lot of criticism against the social credit system. But to me it it just crime history and (financial) credit history mined from big data and combined into a centralized system. > What's particularly bad about the system per se, Tightening everyday social control that's at least partially designed to serve the political goals of an unabashedly authoritarian regime that's self-consciously opposed to things like "universal values of human rights." [1] [2] It might be easier to understand it this way: in China, you're a de-facto criminal if they judge you to be in some way opposed to the regime. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusade-of-chinas-human-rights-lawyers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa... > without getting into the arguments specific to Chinese politics? That's almost like asking what's bad about something without getting into its bad aspects.
- klenwell 8y agoI just got done reading this New Yorker article yesterday: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened... China's social credit system is glossed in the article. Doesn't seem like there are a lot of good outcomes where AI is involved. A passage near the end of the article: In the meantime, we need a Plan B. Bostrom’s [author of book Superintelligence] starts with an effort to slow the race to create an A.G.I. [Artificial General Intelligence] in order to allow more time for precautionary trouble-shooting. Astoundingly, however, he advises that, once the A.G.I. arrives, we give it the utmost possible deference. Not only should we listen to the machine; we should ask it to figure out what we want. The misalignment-of-goals problem would seem to make that extremely risky, but Bostrom believes that trying to negotiate the terms of our surrender is better than the alternative, which is relying on ourselves, “foolish, ignorant, and narrow-minded that we are.” Tegmark [author of book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence] also concludes that we should inch toward an A.G.I. It’s the only way to extend meaning in the universe that gave life to us: “Without technology, our human extinction is imminent in the cosmic context of tens of billions of years, rendering the entire drama of life in our Universe merely a brief and transient flash of beauty.” We are the analog prelude to the digital main event. Takes the idea of moving fast and breaking things to the next level.
- vertexFarm 8y agoRight? I suppose any stupendously powerful technology that isn't yet adequately understood or controlled will tend towards dark uses. AI might be significantly composed of hype today, and there may indeed be an AI winter on the horizon as people start to trade in insane optimism for realistic expectations, but if a little of the hype is true then we have likely completed the equivalent of a Manhattan project to develop something truly nuclear in its potential to disrupt human civilization. In the twentieth century we found a way to leverage physical energies greater than we'd ever imagined humans could wield. Now we might be developing something more subtle, yet also insanely powerful: a way to leverage data manipulation in a way that will slowly transpose democracy and individual thought through brute analytical power. Or so the doomsaying goes. It may be baseless paranoia, but it's credible enough to deserve some very strong caution. From what we've seen in our universe we're probably due to run into a great filter very damn soon. It's probably something we already know about today, in some form at least.
- fraudsyndrome 8y agoI haven't read much about it, but isn't China's social credit system (sesame credit) based off of Aliexpress and NOT from the government like a lot of people are presuming? When people say Chinese social credit system, it sounds like it's the government that owns and enforces it.
- Willson50 8y agoI don't think we can say the AI Winter is here until these large funding rounds stop.
- itake 8y agoThese funding rounds just mean we are using existing tools. The AI winter is regards to discovering new AI techniques, not re-applying existing discoveries to business.
- kinsomo 8y ago> These funding rounds just mean we are using existing tools. The AI winter is regards to discovering new AI techniques, not re-applying existing discoveries to business. There's so much hype around "AI" right now that I wonder if we're headed to a winter where you need very strong business justification to get funding to apply those existing tools. It seems like anyone with a problem to solve is spending millions to throw machine learning at it, just to see if it will stick. That's not sustainable.
- pietroglyph 8y agoI think that even if research just stopped (like in an AI winter), there's still a lot of applications for the tech we have now. I suspect that's where most of this money will go.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoI don’t think we can say that the AI winter is coming without these large funding rounds.
- roymurdock 8y agoFrom the author of the AI Winter post: "I don't think the winter depends on the amount that somebody makes today on AI, rather on how much people are expecting to make in the future. If these don't match, there will be a winter. My take is that there is a huge bet against the future. And if DL ends up bringing just as much profit as it does today, interest will die very, very quickly."
- jpeg_hero 8y agoWith this much money, surely things will end well and this money with be used prudently to advance their future.
- thosakwe 8y agoYou forgot the “/s”
- Proven 8y agoLet me guess, communist princelings on the board?
- auganov 8y agoAI might be one of the few tech niches where China has a legitimate advantage. Obtaining certain kinds of data is tough, there are many unresolved ethical and legal considerations. The communist regime has already proven itself to have no moral qualms about the most abhorrent acts like organ harvesting from political prisoners. Rule of law is not a problem either. The regime has also displayed great interest and belief in AI. Whatever the companies want they're gonna get.
- vonnik 8y agoPowered by Caffe, an open-source framework developed at Berkeley. The irony.
- p1esk 8y agoDeveloped at Berkeley by Yangqing Jia, a Chinese national.
- vonnik 8y agoA Chinese national whose project was backed with US public funds. Triple irony.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoI don't get the irony. Does nationality matter for open source project with a clear license?
- est 8y agoA large portion of US inventions were made by people of different nationals, I don't see the irony here but only narrow-mindedness.
- vonnik 8y agoI'm not objecting to foreign nationals doing publicly funded research in the US. And I was not the first to bring up his nationality. Personally, I don't care what his nationality is. The initial irony I noted was that a US university had produced an open source project that is the chief tool of face detection on the mainland.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThere are (many) more Chinese nobel prize winners who won them for work in the USA than in China. It doesn’t sound like irony.
- angel_j 8y ago
- throwawayMA 8y agoWhile this article notes that the Chinese government is one of Sensetime's most visible partners, it doesn't really make it clear the extent to which private sector companies like SenseTime are inseparable from the public sector in China. By supporting SenseTime as its client, Beijing has signaled to investors like Alibaba that it has chosen a winner, and that it will never let SenseTime fail. As with most mainland tech companies, SenseTime will heed the diktats of the central government, much as social platforms like Weibo march in step on censorship requests. One interesting question this raises is: How can non-Chinese compete against such national champions, this intense cooperation between public and private sectors? In the US, those relationships are much more problematic, as the recent uproar at Google about Project Maven illustrates. Not only that, but the US government is neither as aggressive nor as forward-looking about such partnerships, preferring to let market forces have their way. China is tilting the playing field in its favor, while the world's sole superpower is hobbled by clowns and criminals in the executive branch, and corrupt prime contractors pretend to supply the government with tech that they neither understand nor make themselves.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoThe response from the people I've seen who are quitting Google because of Maven seems to be basically: We should all quit! Unfortunately this is a collective action problem and if there is even one group who defects, then a boycott is for naught. Might slow things down temporarily but in the end wouldn't stop them.
- 8y ago
- djhworld 8y agoOff topic, but just looking through TechCrunchs GDPR options, they list at least 50 'advertising partners' who they work with to personalise your ads. I don't work for a company who runs sites like these, but is that normal? How do you maintain a relationship with 50 different ad vendors, or do they actually just deal with 2-3 and then there's a whole graph of others on some sort of affiliate scheme?
- tzahola 8y agoThe latter. It’s like the recursive junk you collect by installing a single npm package.
- lunaroyster 8y agoI imagine that's what you would get with a competitive marketing team, where everyone would handle one or more of those relationships.
- matachuan 8y agoskynet in action
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mindfulhack 8y agoMore data (the copious amounts of data China is gathering on its people) doesn't itself make AI technology better - or does it, theoretically? Or put it this way: I'm assuming the real revolution in AI will be from talented-ass scientists and algorithms, not just from the amount of data you throw at computers.
- asdsa5325 8y agoFor a lot of problems, more data is the only solution.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoA lot of the algorithms center around enabling the training of more data (e.g. one bit DAC for distributes GPU training).
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- baybal2 8y agoMy comment on SenseTime It is a unicorn of few billion bucks without a SINGLE THING that makes money. They have an "AI" supposedly, but that thing does not make money magically appear in their pocket. At best, they market a face recognition library, that sucks in comparison to a first grader's OpenCV hello world.