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China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

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Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#41

Post by nopinsight »

To give additional evidence why Eric Schmidt's comment has a basis in reality (and to reply to many sceptical comments here):

* 9 out of the top 10 algorithms for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset are by Chinese teams, backed by HIT & iFlLYTEK, Alibaba, Microsoft Asia (in Beijing), NUDT & Fudan University, and others. They beat out teams by Samsung, Salesforce, CMU, and Facebook, for example.

https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

It is not like others do not try. This is a highly commercializable area of research and there is no requirement to publish the technical details of the submitted solution.

* Based on publications from 2015 onward, Peking and Tsinghua University are ranked in the world's top 5 for published papers in top AI conferences (at #3 and #5).

http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...

* China plans to add AI and programming courses in primary education. It is likely that soon, if not already, the proportion of US middle and high schools that offer computer science courses will be lower than China's.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0828/c90000-9261282.html

* Most Chinese kids spend a significant amount of time working on their academics, even outside of school (whether this is good or bad at the individual level is different from the main topic of discussion here), while the same cannot be said about most American children.

* Since 2000, China's team was no. 1 in International Math Olympiad 12 times (out of 18) and 5 times at no. 2

https://imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=CHN

* Mathematics is an important foundation of AI. One needs to be relatively competent at math to understand most AI research papers and even textbooks. The level of math required may look basic to some HN readers but it still takes many years of focused learning to master for most people. Many smart people do not master math simply because they haven't spent the time.

The difference in math skills between the US and China high school students is evident in PISA 2015 results. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the potential proportion of AI-capable natives in China could be 5 times as large as the US. Since China has more than 4 times the population, the potential number could be 20 times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569339

* China is doing everything it can to attract back their top talent as well as those from other countries. A reason for pollution curb, which starts to become successful, is to satisfy talent's requirement for quality of life. They have instituted a competitive program to attract global talent. (At the same time, the US is not exactly sending a welcome signal.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-ar...

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#42

Post by sjg007 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #5

"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions." In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did th…

He should measure that on proportion. China has way more people. So in that regard, the Russians are very good, in fact, probably the best, but they are constrained by their country and economy. The USA imports talent and uses that talent creatively in the economy. If we stop importing talent we are screwed. If we stop increasing our population size we are also basically screwed. China has a billion or so people to feed. They own global manufacturing. A push to robotics and AI based technologies will cause some major disruption to their internal economy.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#43

Post by sjg007 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #31
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

I get spammed by cybercoders even though I click unsubscribe and report spam all the time.

The other issue I have is that the search function doesn't update... I try to search for an email from the day before and it won't show up.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#44

Post by barrkel »

pedrosorio wrote: post #5

"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions." In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did th…

And are participants equally likely from all countries globally?

It seems to me that people who lack other means of signalling excellence and are ambitious to become visible internationally are most likely to enter such competitions.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#45

Post by singularity2001 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #31
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

How about: I send someone an email, he answers, his answer is classified as spam. That's as broken as it can get!

(presumably because google doesn't like 'free' servers)

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#46

Post by candiodari »

Barrin92 wrote: post #23
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very aspirational. I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that it led directly to t…

I don't believe that ML is a talent game at all. I think ML is a data and policy game. There's a lot of talk about AI braininess but from a theoretical standpoint there isn't much new to the currently commercially used ML products. The only thing that's changed over the last five years is data. Backpropagation is decades old. And on the data and policy side China has hugely favourable conditions. I think we're making…

I disagree. Time and time again data advantages and computing power advantages are clobbered by algorithm advances.

For instance, there is no amount of cluster power that'll let you best resnet with a non-residual network. Well perhaps there is, but even Google's mighty clusters can't make up the difference.

In audio, end-to-end models that take 2 weeks to train on a dual GTX 1080 machine, and take > 1 week to train on an entire datacenter beat everything we've ever come up with in linguistics. And it was recently shown that taking the convolutions and redoing in hand-coded assembly gains you more performance than the quite-meager performance a cluster gets you.

The same goes for data. We can outperform VGGNet trained on all of imagenet (~ 15 million images) using resnet trained on a 1% random sampling of imagenet. We have papers putting forth statistics on specific model architectures outperforming with I understand why Google and Microsoft are pushing "you can't beat clusters", but anyone fiddling with batch-size on actual models will quickly realize that it's ... let's say "riddled with MAJOR caveats" (using clusters implicitly forces large batch sizes, which costs you a LOT in training efficiency, especially once you get past the first few rounds, and the better your model, the more it costs).

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#47

Post by aianus »

singularity2001 wrote: post #45
joshuamorton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

How about: I send someone an email, he answers, his answer is classified as spam. That's as broken as it can get! (presumably because google doesn't like 'free' servers)

Maybe your friend's email server is misconfigured? Incorrect SPF records, etc?

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#48

Post by jessriedel »

olympus wrote: post #28

He claims the US government isn't investing in AI. That's false. They're investing in AI, they just aren't giving any money to Google. What would the government do with an AI tuned for advertising? This is likely just Schmidt complaining about not getting free money from the government for once. Besides, it seems like Google is investing plenty of their own money into AI research without the government needing to con…

What US govt investments are you referring to?

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#49

Post by pitaj »

joshuamorton wrote: post #31
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

Lately I've been getting a ton of spam in the form of Amazon phishing attacks. Usually these emails use character substitution or the like to avoid being caught.

I've also noticed recently that spam hits my inbox before being filtered, which is aggravating as that means I get a notification about it.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#50

Post by [deleted] »

joshuamorton wrote: post #31
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

(While I work on Gmail, this is a curiosity) What issues do you have with spam? Personally, I get maybe 1 false-positive spam email per year with Gmail, and maybe a few false-negatives (which are less of an issue anyway), for an accuracy rate in the 3-4 9s range. So I'm intrigued as to what you're doing or where you encounter the inability for gmail to distinguish between real communication and spam.

[deleted]
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