China Gains on the U.S. In the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race

I'm not sure that is a problem...historically the department of Energy (DOE) has lead Supercomputing efforts in the USA and they have focused on other domains of interest (particularly nuclear weapons research). This field is actually not unrelated, in terms of HPC capabilities, Numerical linear algebra, etc to the recent AI work. But physical simulation remains the top priority in part because AI is not seen as an energy technology.

I can state without hesitation that some of the greatest minds in Supercomputing and computational science are permanent members of the staff at these DOE research labs. These staff are selected much like the top AI researchers: academic pedigree and publications in top tier research journals.

Therefore, I think it is more a problem of application. Until government has a killer AI app, it will be hard to justify a massive investment in AI tech at scale. Contrast that with large companies who have already deployed AI tech in production...

Whoa I thought John Markoff retired? Is he still active? He's been one of my favorite NYT writers.

huh... Have been waiting for this comment.

>The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.

This reminds me of a famous story of an early AI system, which competed against humans in a table top war game focused around ship design.

>After weeks of experimentation, and some 10,000 two-to-thirty-minute battles, Eurisko came up with what would be the winning fleet. To the humans in the tournament, the program's solution to Traveller must have seemed bizarre. Most of the contestants squandered their trillion-credit budgets on fancy weaponry, designing agile fleets of about twenty lightly armored ships, each armed with one enormous gun and numerous beam weapons.

>Eurisko, however, had judged that defense was more important than offense, that many cheap, invulnerable ships would outlast fleets consisting of a few high-priced, sophisticated vessels. There were ninety-six ships in Eurisko's fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor. Rather than arming them with a few big, expensive guns, Eurisko chose to use many small weapons.

>In any single exchange of gunfire, Eurisko would lose more ships than it destroyed, but it had plenty to spare. The first battle in the tournament was typical. During four rounds of fire, the opponent sank fifty of Eurisko's ships, but it lost nineteen -all but one-of its own. With forty-six ships left over, Eurisko won.

>Even if an enemy managed to sink all Eurisko's sitting ducks, the program had a secret weapon -a tiny, unarmed extremely agile vessel that was, Lenat wrote, "literally unhittable by any reasonable enemy ship." The usefulness of such a ship was discovered during a simulated battle in which a lifeboat remained afloat round after round, even though the rest of the ships in the fleet had been destroyed. To counter opponents using the same strategy, Eurisko designed another ship equipped with sophisticated guidance computer and a giant accelerator weapon. Its only purpose was killing enemy lifeboats.

I've always wondered if a similar strategy might work in real life.

It's problematic to take scientific claims at face value, regardless of the claimants' ethnicity. It's also problematic to discount claims purely on the basis of the claimant's ethnicity.

AI/machine learning has slightly more accountability than many other scientific fields, in that unless you provide an implementation for people to inspect or your results are easy to replicate, people generally aren't going to be particularly interested for long. There are exceptions to that principle, like AlphaGo, but the tests of AlphaGo speak for themselves. It's a very results-driven field, where you're not going to be able to get away with specious claims for long.