China may match or beat America in AI • Hacker News Board

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#21

Post by visarga » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:47 PM UTC

computerex wrote: post #16

brndnmtthws wrote: post #5

They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

Wait, what does Wikipedia have to do with TensorFlow? I think you are over-simplifying AI. Yes, you can take pre-trained models are do useful things with them. But creating these models and training them initially on vast quantities of data still remains a challenge and has to be overcome by real engineers. Not anyone can do AI at scale.

> Not anyone can do AI at scale.

For that you'd have to wait until next year. Many low level skills necessary in ML are being automated. It's getting closer to being easily used by hackers.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#22

Post by throwawayecchai » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #18

throwawayecchai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love for the down voters to explain why.

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.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#23

Post by maerF0x0 » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #18

throwawayecchai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love for the down voters to explain why.

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…

English language makes it hard to separate Anti-Chinese government (Nationalism?) from Anti-Chinese people (Racism) .

I think most of these comments are referring to the former, a dislike/distrust for the PRC government, not Chinese people.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#24

Post by visarga » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:51 PM UTC

kyleschiller wrote: post #9

some1else wrote: post #3

Lots of domain experts casually mention that there's nothing defensible in a well trained model. If that's what gets you going: Russia could also match or beat America in AI.

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 growing. Once there is a sufficient collection of training data, it's cheap to train your neural nets.

Even today, there is much more data than scientists care to use. For example, ImageNet is over 1TB, but a smaller portion of it is used routinely (it has 21841 topics but usually just 1000 of them are used in research papers). So it's not the lack of images that's keeping them. China would have no advantage here. Everyone has approximately the same level, the best paper of last year is the average of this year. That's about AI in general - but regarding self driving cars and ads Google is cooking in secret so it might be a little more ahead.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#25

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

brndnmtthws wrote: post #13

kyleschiller wrote: post #8

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.

[deleted]

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#26

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

brndnmtthws wrote: post #13

kyleschiller wrote: post #8

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.

[deleted]

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#27

Post by brndnmtthws » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

computerex wrote: post #16

brndnmtthws wrote: post #5

They've got a lot more people, so it's just a matter of time. That, and there aren't any real "trade secrets" when it comes to AI. It's all just computer code, and anyone with an Internet connection can teach themselves how to use Wikipedia and run TensorFlow.

Wait, what does Wikipedia have to do with TensorFlow? I think you are over-simplifying AI. Yes, you can take pre-trained models are do useful things with them. But creating these models and training them initially on vast quantities of data still remains a challenge and has to be overcome by real engineers. Not anyone can do AI at scale.

TensorFlow is the trendiest ML library, and Wikipedia is a source of knowledge. You can gain the knowledge required to effectively use TensorFlow (or whatever) from freely available sources, provided you have the interest and tenacity.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#28

Post by throwawayecchai » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #23

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…

English language makes it hard to separate Anti-Chinese government (Nationalism?) from Anti-Chinese people (Racism) . I think most of these comments are referring to the former, a dislike/distrust for the PRC government, not Chinese people.

Yes, thank you. Mea Culpa. I have updated my original comment to reflect that.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#29

Post by rrggrr » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

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 asleep or mad with partisan fever.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#30

Post by Will_Do » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

What a strange comment.

Why do you think this has anything to do with racism? Is anything claiming an Asian country is doing better than a white country Yellow Peril? If not, why is this an instance of it?