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Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

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Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#11
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining

Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#12
post #11
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.

I think China has plenty of data as well, of its own people at least. It's a surveillance state, and the big corps work closely with the government and so also the universities. My point is more that they have a chance of winning the ML race, but that doesn't matter if there will be more important technological breakthroughs in other areas that will have greater impact on AI than ML.

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#13
post #5

Few things in the world scare me more than the idea of Xi Jinping with control over semiautonomous flying robocops. Other people worry about climate change. Some religious nutcases worry about paperclip maximizers and basilisks. I worry about Robocop.

I assume that cheap flying drones are the weapons of the future, not just in military but police too. Small drones everywhere of all kinds. The drones would at least be semi-autonomous as having a human behind every single drone sounds expensive at scale.

Luckily drones still have significant limitations on achievable flight time. Some of which are dictated by the laws of physics. So for the foreseeable future there won’t be any bird sized drones chasing you down. Military drones on the other hand are much larger and expensive.

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#14
When Chinese leaders start talking about not being reliant on Western technology, rightly or wrongly, I immediately start thinking about their previous industrial espionage campaigns to remove the reliance on Western aerospace technology. [1]

I'd be a lot more relaxed about these sorts of announcements if the Chinese government took steps to curb Red Army cyber-attacks.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/31/us-charges-10-ch...

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#15
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

> all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining.

I quickly checked zhihu.com's hot topics related to CS, zhihu.com can be regarded as the Chinese counterpart of quora.com

the topic AI has 1.34m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19551275/hot

the topic e-commerce has 1.14m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19550780/hot

the topic database has 0.8m followers https://www.zhihu.com/topic/19552067/hot

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#16
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

> they may lack progress in other fundamental fields

Well if they crack general intelligence maybe they can generate, copy and paste researchers in those other fundamental fields.

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#17
post #11
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.

Comment of the year

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#19
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

Lack of substantial practical applications might make it a substantial waste of time and money.

Does anybody remember the 5th gen computing stuff from 30 years ago?

Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future

#20
post #9

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…

It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked.

I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

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