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China may match or beat America in AI

economist.com

11–20 of 114 posts

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#11

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks. A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team. They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types. Till 2 days…

Would love for the down voters to explain why.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#12

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks. A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team. They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types. Till 2 days…

"seems like a Chinese front if you look at the team."

...you mean it's Chinese people? What on earth makes this a "Chinese front" rather than just a company with a Chinese team?

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#13

They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

'It's all just computer code' Are you saying no software has trade secrets? Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC. You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and they're far from becoming a world leader.

Most of the time, secrets and other forms of protectionism are techniques used for covering up incompetence, or hiding bad behaviour.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#14

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks. A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team. They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types. Till 2 days…

Didn't downvote, but curious: how do you know the Chinese VC's are fake?

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#15

They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

More people applies to many applications. Drug research, for example, would greatly increase if China got into that business.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#16

They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

Wait, what does Wikipedia have to do with TensorFlow? I think you are over-simplifying AI. Yes, you can take pre-trained models are do useful things with them. But creating these models and training them initially on vast quantities of data still remains a challenge and has to be overcome by real engineers.

Not anyone can do AI at scale.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'It's all just computer code' Are you saying no software has trade secrets? Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC. You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and they're far from becoming a world leader.

This really depends on what is the driver of the current rise of neural networks and other similar machine learning techniques... whats the contributions of data and method toward the new improvements in performance? If more data is main contribution I would venture to say that China can indeed beat USA.

It's a combination of recent innovations and more data. Having access to more annotated/labeled data has definitely propelled the state of the art in some disciplines like machine vision.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#18

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks. A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team. They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types. Till 2 days…

Would love for the down voters to explain why.

You described Chinese people organizing and attending an open technical conference with permission, and offer the unproven statement that several speakers would have refused to speak if they had known just how "Chinese" it was going to be ahead of time.

I'm not sure how those speakers couldn't just cancel, sure they'd lose any speaking fees but I've never heard of lock-in speaking contracts for conferences. Or if they care so much they could just modify their speeches to not supply anything of value. Or perhaps they should have done their homework ahead of time.

In any case I'd hardly call it a "nefarious trick" regardless of who was doing it. I'm hesitant to throw out "racist", but you seem to be leaning that way...

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#19
If you're going to comment about the "Chinese takeover" please take 2 minutes to at least read the first paragraph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril

'The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) is a racist color-metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism: that the peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western world. As a psycho-cultural perception of menace from the East, fear of the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror is the white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from the Orient.[1]'

It's entirely possible that you have a valid point to make, and maybe it's even an interesting and important one, but maybe also take a second to consider if it might be motivated by racist tropes.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#20

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks. A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team. They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types. Till 2 days…

Didn't downvote, but curious: how do you know the Chinese VC's are fake?

By fake I mean fronts for the Chinese Gov. There have been numerous reports in NYTimes and other reputable media on this topic, including many that have been posted here on HN.

Of course not all of them are such, but many are. Just look at the team behind many of these, team's credentials and experience, and in many cases their addresses and actual offices.

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