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China may match or beat America in AI

economist.com

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#41

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.

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

bold claim. citation needed for "most of the time".

common counterpoints: secrets can be operationally necessary, secrets can create economic value.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#42

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…

To be fair, China is a AI powerhouse in its own right. China is investing a lot of its money domestically on this problem as well. Lots of legitimate papers come from purely Chinese teams. ResNet was developed by a purely Chinese team. A lot of very important open source machine learning software out there is written almost entirely by Chinese nationals.

It's important to note this because shutting down Silicon Valley/US access to Chinese VCs and companies won't necessarily just harm them. It would harm us as well. It does need to be looked at though, just carefully.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#43
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…

Btw, The Economist is a British media, not an U.S. media. So your assumption of domestic media not talking about the bigger fiscal issues in US doesn't really apply in this particular case. And traditionally, The Economist has covered a lot of aspect of China in a fair and analytical angle than any other US medias do.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#44
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…

Don't mask simplistic ideological beliefs about debt and economics as some kind of melodramatic reality everyone else but you is ignoring.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#45

And given happenings like the death in captivity of Liu Xiaobo, that should scare the living hell out of you.

No idea why this is being downvoted. It's a very salient point. The death of a nobel laureate while in captivity as a political prisoner last occurred in Germany in 1938. Much as people should have been scared by German rocket and tank tech in the 30's, they should be scared of Chinese AI tech today. its not an unreasonable assumption that this technology is going to be used for things that run counter to the values of many people in US, with the enhancement of the domestic security apparatus and control of the media chief among them.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#47
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…

70% of the US federal government budget is 15% of GDP. Not such a big deal, especially considering that we're going to be paying for pensions and healthcare somehow, whether as a government program or otherwise.

Rubicon? I don't recall the sacred oath not to cross a 100% debt-to-GDP ratio. What's the importance of that particular round number, which many countries including the US have crossed in the past, except for rhetoric?

Finally, what makes you think corporations are holding cash waiting for fiscal stability, of all things? How would US dollars or bonds help them in case of US fiscal instability? Isn't it more parsimonious to think that they're waiting for return on investment? And that has much more to do with growth than with government debt.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#48
post #7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...looks like the first prototype of 1984 will go live in China. First of all Chinese should be worried but to my constant surprise many don't.

Many simply don't know. For instance, Liu Xiaobo was banned from public speaking and it was banned to publish his writing. I won't be surprised if he was better known outside China than inside.

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