8 ms·

Is China Beating America to AI Supremacy?

28 points by notlukesky 7y ago

TheFiend7 7y ago
I'm unsure of if the American government is just extremely discreet in their development of cyber warfare technology or America just isn't investing in technology as much as other countries. But it seems like even Russia is beating us... Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does.
- noir_lord 7y ago
  Given the size of the US military budget and their propensity for black projects (which given they are a democracy they kind of have to do since almost everything in the regular military gets released/leaked) I'd be positively amazed if they didn't have a serious black program for this stuff. Given the risk/reward and how cheap it is to do compared to a single B2 or a handful of F35's at least.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  No people just don't assume very obvious defense spending is the US doing so. SV was built in its very beginning was built for the US army. It still is with startups like Palantír.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does. If the priority was to build a good system. However, powerful government factions think that all government development must be farmed wholesale to private business, because of a twisted ideological belief in the market. Those private businesses are ruled by the ideology that shareholder value is the ultimate and only good, so they slap their products together as cheaply as possible. The result of that toxic stew is that we can't have nice things.
- kmonsen 7y ago
  For the voting machines you have to remember a large part of the US political class have coinciding interests with Russia here, they want those machines to be hacked. If there was an actual cyber war I am confident the US can hold it's own if it wants to.
threatofrain 7y ago
> So while San Francisco recently banned facial recognition technologies, the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts.
- yorwba 7y ago
  If Chinese companies have access to billions of images and that's a million times more than their Western counterparts, Western companies are limited to small datasets in the thousands. That doesn't make sense. Microsoft used to hand out the millions of images in their Celeb dataset for free, and Facebook can use every image their users ever posted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mindgam3 7y ago
The entire idea of an “AI arms race” that we are losing to China is fear-mongering by those with a vested interest in defense spending, ie military industrial complex. This is a human rights issue more than an arms race. The fact that SF is banning facial recognition tech while the Chinese state is going all in (as another commenter notes) is a win.
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  No it’s not. It’s a huge deal. You’re just not being imaginative enough.
  - MertsA 7y ago
    From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of. We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?
    - dragontamer 7y ago
      > From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of. Yeah, that's why our plane systems are being designed as such. We don't call "AI Fighters" "AI Fighters". We call them surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, and drones. For the case where a human needs to be close to support our "AIs" (aka: missiles and drones), we're creating F35 as nearby stealth supporter. Thats why the F35 isn't good at dogfights, its assumed that drones / missiles will take care of that sort of stuff in the future. The dogfight race has been lost to air-to-air missiles. Humans can't take the kinds of Gs that a missile can do, you can't outrun something like that in a "fair" circumstance (outside of Blackbird-style "too high / too fast" situations). ----------- > We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems odd to say that war requires human cost in order to be important. Perhaps the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were considered failures not because of their (relatively low) human costs, but because the politics didn't work out in their favor.
josteink 7y ago
I do t know about the all-in-all situation, but as an anecdote I had to return a mid-range iRobot Roomba because it didn’t work near as well as expected. The Xiaomi I bought for half the price worked excellently though. The reason? I’m sure the mechanics are mostly the same, but the AI on the Xiaomi seems way better so it actually figures out a good route throughout the house in a way the Roomba never did, and after 30 minutes it is done, as opposed to still trying to find the way out of the kitchen like the Roomba was.
kresten 7y ago
“AI supremacy” like it’s a podium.
rgbrenner 7y ago
the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts. That doesn't sound right. 1.4b photos is nothing compared to facebook and google. Facebook + Instagram has 2.3b + 1b active users and each one uploads tons of photos. Facebook uses these for facial recognition. Google owns Android (2.5b active users).. and if you've enabled face auth, Android is sending your photo to google to be analyzed. They could also use Google Photos and Youtube videos (although I don't know that they do). Amazon owns Rekognition.. and if you're using it, they're taking the photos you process with it and using it for training. They're used by law enforcement and a variety of companies, and I'd be willing to bet they have more than 1.4b photos. These are probably better data sets for training too.. since they show people in the real world vs China's ID photo database of people posing for a photo.
- bllguo 7y ago
  facial recognition is a particularly weird example too. the data is skewed from the onset when your image sources are pretty much all han chinese. This has already been a problem in the west with most photos being of white people, but china would have this issue to a far greater degree.
yters 7y ago
Do we want to win the race to big brother?
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  AI is a tool. It's algorithms. Those algorithms are going to be developed and improved, regardless. Your concern is with how those algorithms are used/applied in our world. Just like CRISPR. It's a valid concern.
  - yters 7y ago
    A guillotine is a tool. You can use it for chopping watermelon or heads.
Havoc 7y ago
Yes. I don't see the US winning this one given China's brute force, no rules approach. See their social credit thing. SV as great as it is will have a hard time competing against that wild west approach given that it is still constrained by rules.
- OldHand2018 7y ago
  > China's brute force, no rules approach Is there any evidence in all of human history that demonstrates that a "brute force, no rules, unlimited resource" approach ever does anything but eventually collapse upon itself?
  - bllguo 7y ago
    this is not a very persuasive tack though. what approach hasn't collapsed upon itself over time?
  - Havoc 7y ago
    >Is there any evidence in all of human history I don't think there is a precedent for what's happening over there. It's too complete & all-ecompassing. Deducing anything from history is dangerous when you're dealing with a entirely different & new beast.
  - sgpl 7y ago
    IMO the indigenous/native populations of North America being almost wiped off the continent is one example. "Brute force / no rules" worked in that regard for the colonialists / settlers.
thekingofh 7y ago
No.
carapace 7y ago
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-lanchester/document-number-nine https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-lanchester/docu... "Document Number Nine" by John Lanchester > There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. > This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. > There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history. > Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in the early 1980s, there has been a general view in the West that the gradual encroachment of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic government. This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined belief that capitalism and democracy are interlinked. > The Chinese government favours the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignty’, in which countries have control over their own versions of the internet. Kai Strittmatter was for many years the Beijing correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his excellent "We Have Been Harmonised" is an eye-opening account of this issue. (‘Harmonised’ is a euphemism for ‘censored’.) > > The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. The CCP believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it intends to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen. > In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily known as ‘Document Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’; ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public opinion on the internet’. > Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it.
jariel 7y ago
The AI boom is overstated. There is not a single piece of technology, not a single 'problem solved' that necessarily requires Deep Learning this very day. Some Voice and Translation apps are improved by it, but not by that much. Yes, this will change over time, particularly as things like 'computer vision' are effectively more dependant on it - and -that tech will enable things like driverless cars ... but it's still overstated. There is an ever growing army of AI researchers putting out stuff, and they will all improve our lives marginally, but I'm doubtful that AI in and of itself will be the thing that really creates change. I suggest that the 'future robot that cleans your toilet and makes a ham sandwich' will be 10% AI and 90% advances in every other kind of technology. I'll bet that only isolated systems of such robots are primarily AI driven (i.e. vision, motor control for fluid movement etc.) and the rest is just plain old software.
brij0102 7y ago
It depends on where in the AI lifecycle we are ... I believe we are still barely scratching the surface and mostly using it to solve old problems. This ‘race’ could just help improve the field enough that we can get to some real fun stuff!

28 points by notlukesky 7y ago

I'm unsure of if the American government is just extremely discreet in their development of cyber warfare technology or America just isn't investing in technology as much as other countries. But it seems like even Russia is beating us... Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does.

noir_lord 7y ago
Given the size of the US military budget and their propensity for black projects (which given they are a democracy they kind of have to do since almost everything in the regular military gets released/leaked) I'd be positively amazed if they didn't have a serious black program for this stuff. Given the risk/reward and how cheap it is to do compared to a single B2 or a handful of F35's at least.
DeonPenny 7y ago
No people just don't assume very obvious defense spending is the US doing so. SV was built in its very beginning was built for the US army. It still is with startups like Palantír.
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does. If the priority was to build a good system. However, powerful government factions think that all government development must be farmed wholesale to private business, because of a twisted ideological belief in the market. Those private businesses are ruled by the ideology that shareholder value is the ultimate and only good, so they slap their products together as cheaply as possible. The result of that toxic stew is that we can't have nice things.
kmonsen 7y ago
For the voting machines you have to remember a large part of the US political class have coinciding interests with Russia here, they want those machines to be hacked. If there was an actual cyber war I am confident the US can hold it's own if it wants to.

threatofrain 7y ago

> So while San Francisco recently banned facial recognition technologies, the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts.

yorwba 7y ago
If Chinese companies have access to billions of images and that's a million times more than their Western counterparts, Western companies are limited to small datasets in the thousands. That doesn't make sense. Microsoft used to hand out the millions of images in their Celeb dataset for free, and Facebook can use every image their users ever posted.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mindgam3 7y ago

The entire idea of an “AI arms race” that we are losing to China is fear-mongering by those with a vested interest in defense spending, ie military industrial complex. This is a human rights issue more than an arms race. The fact that SF is banning facial recognition tech while the Chinese state is going all in (as another commenter notes) is a win.

natalyarostova 7y ago
No it’s not. It’s a huge deal. You’re just not being imaginative enough.
- MertsA 7y ago
  From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of. We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    > From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of. Yeah, that's why our plane systems are being designed as such. We don't call "AI Fighters" "AI Fighters". We call them surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, and drones. For the case where a human needs to be close to support our "AIs" (aka: missiles and drones), we're creating F35 as nearby stealth supporter. Thats why the F35 isn't good at dogfights, its assumed that drones / missiles will take care of that sort of stuff in the future. The dogfight race has been lost to air-to-air missiles. Humans can't take the kinds of Gs that a missile can do, you can't outrun something like that in a "fair" circumstance (outside of Blackbird-style "too high / too fast" situations). ----------- > We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems odd to say that war requires human cost in order to be important. Perhaps the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were considered failures not because of their (relatively low) human costs, but because the politics didn't work out in their favor.

josteink 7y ago

I do t know about the all-in-all situation, but as an anecdote I had to return a mid-range iRobot Roomba because it didn’t work near as well as expected. The Xiaomi I bought for half the price worked excellently though. The reason? I’m sure the mechanics are mostly the same, but the AI on the Xiaomi seems way better so it actually figures out a good route throughout the house in a way the Roomba never did, and after 30 minutes it is done, as opposed to still trying to find the way out of the kitchen like the Roomba was.

kresten 7y ago

“AI supremacy” like it’s a podium.

rgbrenner 7y ago

the Party has given China’s top four facial recognition firms access to its database of over 1.4 billion citizen photos. One well-informed venture capitalist in this arena estimates that Chinese facial recognition firms have one million times more images than their U.S. counterparts. That doesn't sound right. 1.4b photos is nothing compared to facebook and google. Facebook + Instagram has 2.3b + 1b active users and each one uploads tons of photos. Facebook uses these for facial recognition. Google owns Android (2.5b active users).. and if you've enabled face auth, Android is sending your photo to google to be analyzed. They could also use Google Photos and Youtube videos (although I don't know that they do). Amazon owns Rekognition.. and if you're using it, they're taking the photos you process with it and using it for training. They're used by law enforcement and a variety of companies, and I'd be willing to bet they have more than 1.4b photos. These are probably better data sets for training too.. since they show people in the real world vs China's ID photo database of people posing for a photo.

bllguo 7y ago
facial recognition is a particularly weird example too. the data is skewed from the onset when your image sources are pretty much all han chinese. This has already been a problem in the west with most photos being of white people, but china would have this issue to a far greater degree.

yters 7y ago

Do we want to win the race to big brother?

Tempest1981 7y ago
AI is a tool. It's algorithms. Those algorithms are going to be developed and improved, regardless. Your concern is with how those algorithms are used/applied in our world. Just like CRISPR. It's a valid concern.
- yters 7y ago
  A guillotine is a tool. You can use it for chopping watermelon or heads.

Havoc 7y ago

Yes. I don't see the US winning this one given China's brute force, no rules approach. See their social credit thing. SV as great as it is will have a hard time competing against that wild west approach given that it is still constrained by rules.

OldHand2018 7y ago
> China's brute force, no rules approach Is there any evidence in all of human history that demonstrates that a "brute force, no rules, unlimited resource" approach ever does anything but eventually collapse upon itself?
- bllguo 7y ago
  this is not a very persuasive tack though. what approach hasn't collapsed upon itself over time?
- Havoc 7y ago
  >Is there any evidence in all of human history I don't think there is a precedent for what's happening over there. It's too complete & all-ecompassing. Deducing anything from history is dangerous when you're dealing with a entirely different & new beast.
- sgpl 7y ago
  IMO the indigenous/native populations of North America being almost wiped off the continent is one example. "Brute force / no rules" worked in that regard for the colonialists / settlers.

thekingofh 7y ago

No.

carapace 7y ago

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-lanchester/document-number-nine https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-lanchester/docu... "Document Number Nine" by John Lanchester > There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. > This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. > There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history. > Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of ‘reform and opening’ in the early 1980s, there has been a general view in the West that the gradual encroachment of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic government. This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined belief that capitalism and democracy are interlinked. > The Chinese government favours the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignty’, in which countries have control over their own versions of the internet. Kai Strittmatter was for many years the Beijing correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his excellent "We Have Been Harmonised" is an eye-opening account of this issue. (‘Harmonised’ is a euphemism for ‘censored’.) > > The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. The CCP believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it intends to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen. > In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily known as ‘Document Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’; ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public opinion on the internet’. > Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it.

jariel 7y ago

The AI boom is overstated. There is not a single piece of technology, not a single 'problem solved' that necessarily requires Deep Learning this very day. Some Voice and Translation apps are improved by it, but not by that much. Yes, this will change over time, particularly as things like 'computer vision' are effectively more dependant on it - and -that tech will enable things like driverless cars ... but it's still overstated. There is an ever growing army of AI researchers putting out stuff, and they will all improve our lives marginally, but I'm doubtful that AI in and of itself will be the thing that really creates change. I suggest that the 'future robot that cleans your toilet and makes a ham sandwich' will be 10% AI and 90% advances in every other kind of technology. I'll bet that only isolated systems of such robots are primarily AI driven (i.e. vision, motor control for fluid movement etc.) and the rest is just plain old software.

brij0102 7y ago

It depends on where in the AI lifecycle we are ... I believe we are still barely scratching the surface and mostly using it to solve old problems. This ‘race’ could just help improve the field enough that we can get to some real fun stuff!