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China may match or beat America in AI

economist.com

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Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#31

Post by scottLobster »

throwawayecchai wrote: post #22
scottLobster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Fair enough, but I have never ever seen a conference change it's title overnight, two days before the actual event, to such an extent. Nefarious or not, it does seem a bait and switch - won't you agree. I had signed up to attend, initially, now I'm not so sure.

If their goal was a bait-and-switch then why change the title? If you're trying to con someone out of information why make the victim aware of your intentions right before the con? It is possible that they thought "US China AI Summit" would be a little alienating so to get some initial sign-ups they put out something softer, but that just seems like a marketing decision. When I hear "Building Across Borders" my first thought is "Oh, it's an international conference. Let's see which countries will be there! Oh look it's a ton of Chinese people...", not really concealing anything beyond the superficial.

I have no love of the Chinese government, but this is a free exchange of ideas that is open to the public (for a $40 ticket). Given the actions of the Chinese government to date, if this is how they plan to get more technical data going into the future I'm hoping they do more of this and less hacking of proprietary/classified info. :P

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#32

Post by kyleschiller »

throwawayecchai wrote: post #20
meri_dian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really curious what about an address tells you that a company is a front for the Chinese government. Do you mean it's an address in Beijing?

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#33

Post by cat199 »

visarga wrote: post #24
kyleschiller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is subtitled "Its deep pool of data may let it lead in artificial intelligence" for a reason, you can't just pull a "well trained" model out of thin air, and proprietary data is absolutely defensible.

You'd think China would have an advantage here. But the kind of special data only Google and FB have is mostly related to ads and people profiles. That's not the kind of data you need to advance AI. Instead, what is needed is user labeled images, videos, text, speech and of course, simulations (games, VR) for virtual robotics and reinforcement learning agents. These kinds of data and simulations are open sourced and…

> But the kind of special data only Google and FB have is mostly related to ads and people profiles. That's not the kind of data you need to advance AI. > Instead, what is needed is user labeled images, videos, text, speech.

umm:

google image search, all html embedded/related metadata, adwords itself serving as a refined metadata/tagging and ontology database building engine, recaptcha 'how many buildings are in this picture' puzzles, android debug settings where things are uploaded, google drive cloud storage, gmail, the google speaker gizmo and voice activated phone agent, google voice voip, google chat, maps annotations to pictures/gps coordinates, etc etc etc and yadda yadda yadda...

not sure what else you need as far as those sources..

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#34

Post by Sargos »

rrggrr wrote: post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

You are just fear mongering. USA's debt to GDP ratio is not a problem for our economy or anything else and won't be for a very long time. The US economy is growing fast enough that the debt-to-GDP has no effect on our stability as we could pay it off if we wanted to and do indeed have plans for this sort of thing. Also most of our debt is actually owned by US citizens which also helps make this a non issue. There's a reason nobody credible thinks the sky is falling. It's not.

Helpful article: https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-debt-to-gdp-ratio-197...

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#35

Post by ChuckMcM »

Here I was looking for the Dr. Strangelove equivalent of the "AI Gap" :-)

Given that in the next four years it is likely that more than half of the PhDs awarded by top US schools are awarded to foreign nationals[1], and our current government policy is to restrict immigration as much as possible, we are on a path to insuring that soon the world will have a much better pool of talent to draw on to do the research than the US will.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/20...

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#36

Post by bitcuration »

kyleschiller wrote: post #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 Eas…

I don't see how this article can be related to that Wikipedia. it's overly reactive and exhibited a lack of self confidence from the people felt offended.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#37

Post by [deleted] »

throwawayecchai wrote: post #20
meri_dian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#39

Post by yequalsx »

rrggrr wrote: post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

Medicare and Social Security are not entitlements. Social Security is a pension system that we pay into. There are some exceptions to this for Social Security but a large majority of the funds payed out are to people who paid into the system. Medicare is an insurance system for the elderly. We all pay into it. Social Security and Medicare happen to be government run and there aren't options to opt out of them but they are not welfare or entitlement programs.

The shortcomings for Social Security are easy to fix. I don't know about Medicare and it's actuarial prospects.

Crossing the 100% debt/gdp ratio is not a Rubicon. Lots of countries have done this and been none the worse for having done so. The U.S. famously exceeded 100% debt/gdp ratio during WWII. It was able to come down from that.

Current debt obligations for the U.S. are in low interest bonds. The borrowing of the money has not crippled the nation. Spending it poorly on stupid wars, a massive surveillance/security apparatus in the form of DOD, CIA, etc. has been a problem. Currently, as a percent of GDP taxes in the U.S. are quite low.

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

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#40

Post by linkages »

rrggrr wrote: post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

China has 300%+ GDP to Debt ratio, collapsing economy, declining forex, fake GDP numbers, strict capital controls, internet censorship, middle income trap, authoritarian regime that brutalizes treatment of its own people, floods the world with cheap, shoddy products that destroys the manufacturing and community of other countries, pollution, poisonous food, poisonous water, mindwashing culture, allies with NK that seeks to destroy the world, pollutes the earth, etc.

And what do people want to talk about? how bad (supposedly) US is. When US leads the world in innovation and protection against aggression from NK and Russia (and China), ruled by dictators that brutalizes its own people. Whataboutism.

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