China’s AI Awakening (opens in new tab)

Also, my previous comment in a thread on China's progress in quantum computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535241

China's advances in AI are impressive as well. A ranking based on publications at top conferences from 2012 to present (2017) has both Beijing and Tsinghua University in the world's top 5.

http://csrankings.org/#/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp

(The starting year in the link needs to be changed to 2012.)

Many of the top researchers in US academia are mainland Chinese. I wonder if they will be enticed back home when the Chinese government has managed to reduce the pollution in their major cities down to healthy levels. It appears that the salary for top people there, especially those with experience at major Western institutions, is comparable to those in the US in nominal terms, and the research funding is easier to get.

This article adds nothing new to the discussion about AI.

* We knew about Tencent's AI Lab (Saying you need your own capabilities is another way of saying: We have NIH and we will waste 3 years building our own framework from the bottom up).

* We knew about China's AI plan, which was announced in July. That was huge news at the time.

* We knew about Baidu, but Baidu is actually slipping. They lost Andrew Ng and Adam Coates, and frankly they have executed poorly on social media and cloud computing compared to Tencent and Ali. It looks like they'll lose their lead in AI.

And the article actually contradicts its own sub-headline: "The West shouldn’t fear China’s artificial-intelligence revolution. It should copy it." The West is leading in AI research, and China is copying the West. So what does it mean that the West should copy China? China is playing catch up in AI just like it has been playing catch up in GDP growth. Catching up always moves faster than blazing a trail. The West is blazing a trail now. They don't have much to learn from players trying to catch up.

As an Indian, India's performance in the PISA test is simultaneously both humiliating and horrifying. India ended up near the bottom of the test when it first took it. Cause for concern? Sure! What did the government of India do? They pulled out of the test citing that it was "unfair" to the Indian students. Around 70 odd nations apparently didn't have this problem.

I have come to think that the country barely has a government at all. We're somehow coping amidst the chaos.

pardon my ignorance, but what is the specific correlation of math skills to dominance in AI ? yes, AI/ML/dnn uses substantial amounts of linear algebra, much the way accountancy uses large amounts of arithmetic. but we don’t see mathematicians racing to be accountants. i have specifically written to several math departments in the US asking if they do any sort of AI/ML related graduate research. Even schools that offer courses like “math of deep learning” are happy to confess that this is just a bait - they are using that course title to hook more students to sign up, but the course content is plain old eigenvalues and matrix decompositions and what used to previously be called “advanced linear algebra”. you aren’t likely to get any AI breakthroughs from math folks - that is simply not the focus of math depts. i have correspondended with several COLT folks who deal with the theoretical end of sgd/neural nets/ statistical learning, and even there the correlation with math is expendable.

now if you are talking statistics, in particular applied statistics, most of those departments are retooling by hiring ml folks from csee departments. but the bread and butter courses required to get a stat phd remain the same as they were a decade ago - 2 core inference courses, 2 core math-stat measure theoretic courses, 2 courses on experimental stats. literally no stat dept mandates an ML course, though a few do allow ml as an elective. now, all of this can and will change over the next few years, but its very early days.

essentially, predicating ai dominance on raw math skills is a mistake. there’s no significant correlation.

The US will continue to cut funding for research and higher education in general. This will give China the edge in almost every level and attract top researchers back. The US is losing its edge.

Just wait until they apply that talent to go all Minority Report with social control and their Sesame Credit system. It'll be way easier than with crime; look at the wealth of information on social media, and people want to be listened to.

Chairman Yang? Nah, y'all; it's gonna be Chairman Jinping.

Even with the hostile environment in the US, I suspect China is far more hostile. I don't see China retaining top talent--these individuals might simply go to Europe, Canada, Japan or elsewhere.

> ...but anyone sitting here scoffing that China can’t make itself a world leader in a field by simply pouring money and support onto the problem needs a serious history lesson. They have before, and there is every indiction they will again, here with this.

What are they currently leading?

The US has dumped large amounts of money and support behind huge scientific endeavors like the Human Genome Project.

Certainly that example helped advance genomic science and the biotech industry in America. But it didn't quite live up to the hype, and it hasn't exactly saved the US economy from the normal ups and downs of global competition.

Course ya never know, could be the start of the next ARPANET too.

The current crop of AIs is already starting to make a big impact in commercial and other spheres. All of the major tech giants in the US and China are using AI in their offerings and behind the scenes. There are substantial differences between the two eras.

This should be the top post. Marc Andreesen commented back when he was in college he was freaking about the Japanese taking over tech and how he was worried he didn’t know Japanese.

I wonder if the late 80s are repeating themselves in more ways than one. Huge domestic asset bubble waiting to pop including massive speculation in foreign real estate, and perhaps even a 3rd AI winter? It doesn’t have to happen the same way, of course.

Excellent point. But you have to factor in american companies international reach. Chinese companies dominate china and that is extremely lucrative, but american tech companies dominate europe and the americas and the rest of the world.

Europe and at americas combined have a larger population than china and a geographical landmass 3X larger than china.

The real question is why europe ( 800 million people ) and latin america ceded their tech industry and data to the US.

If data is the oil of the 21st century, then the US, china and india are going to rule the nest. Europe has no future and neither does south america.

I under why china, russia, etc had protected their own internal industries to compete against FB, GOOGL, TWTR, AMZN, etc. I just don't understand why europe, south america, etc haven't.

All europe/south america have/had to do is invest a few billion to capture a few trillion in wealth. Instead, they've ceded all that wealth to predominately american tech companies. It's very strange when you think about it.

I haven’t used a personal check states side in many many years; I don’t even bother ordering them anymore going for a cashiers check on the rare case I need a check for something. And when was the last time you went to an ATM in the states, maybe once every 6 months?

In contrast, up until a few years ago, I had to bring a backpack full of 100 RMB notes to pay my rent every 3 months. China has made a transition for sure, but don’t forget the local problems they were solving (poor penetration of UnionPay, poor online payment facilities). And online retail and a godsend when you consider the horrible state owned department store system and anemic brick and mortar retail clones they replaced.

Chinese companies will probably change the game in china, it as long as they are focused and limited to local problems, I don’t see how it will effect the west very much.

One advantage China has in payments is the lack of incumbent credit corporations. In the United States credit cards were widely deployed and trusted decades ago while in China tech companies have an open playing field where real innovation can happen fast.

They're not growing 2x every year. Even the article you linked says "“China’s labor costs are increasing, or doubling, every few years,”"

In any case, the advantage of cheap human labour has already been replaced by what you call 'cheap machine labour'. China has been able to dominate manufacturing in large part by giving companies access to cheap capital, which allows them to invest in machines. Silicon chips aren't made by hand. PCBs aren't soldered by hand.

Yes, lots. StackGAN comes to mind.

ya, i mean, how could anyone think that those robots from China can think outside of the box right?

/sarcasm

US government basically mandated the Moon landings, and they happened within 12 years from Sputnik. So I'd say yes, sometimes a government can just mandate progress.

Japan has a significantly smaller population than China (and the US). I’m not sure how this eluded commentators in the 80s, but it seems a major difference this time around.

Arguably high-value business problems that are currently being solved by AI and ML methods: 1) serving personalized ads, 2) efficient stock and commodity trading 3) fraud detection

Care to hazard some examples of the latter?

Caveat: the US News rankings are famously cooked and unreliable. You'd expect that from a cash cow that singularly keeps the US News brand alive, as well as the deliberate efforts of universities to drive up their brand's rank.

According to Wiki, three more independent and open source of rankings are the Acad. Ranking of World Univs, Times Higher Education, and Quaccquarelli Symonds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_ranking...

The Chronicle of Higher Education is also a well-regarded rater, esp. in assessment of research.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-World-University-Rankin...

Well, it's interesting to see that the USNews ranks Harvard ahead of UCBerkeley. Back when I used to work at a quant shop in NYC, Harvard wasn't even considered for hiring -- they only recruited from MIT, CMU, UIUC, Berkeley, Stanford and UToronto.

Also, not surprisingly, most quants were Chinese.

Keep in mind they also have some pretty significant plagarism and pay-to-publish problems.

The United States was once seen as uncultured, unrefined, and frankly quite weak by most of Western Europe until the late 1800's. And in many respects it was. Now the US is the richest country in the world, and is where wealthy non-Americans send their children and make land investments.

My point is that trajectory is more relevant to these discussions than current state of affairs. The quality of life of the average Chinese citizen (and more so the upper-middle class Chinese citizen) has increased DRAMATICALLY in the last 40 years. So when people talk about China's potential, they aren't talking about the situation in the next 5 or 10 years. They're talking about who is going exert massive international influence in the next 50 years. So you're right, most westerners aren't buying speculative property in Beijing (despite the fact that housing in central Beijing is nearly as expensive as New York City), but I'd wager there's a good chance of that changing in the next 50 years.

China is "great" in some aspects and not great in others. The one party system allows the government to make decisive decisions and act with the backing of tax dollars. Look at the high speed rail system. It pretty much went from non existent to one of the world's best rail systems in a matter of years. It's the same with this AI initiative.

Why are rich parents sending their kids to the US? There's a shortage of jobs for college graduates in China and many parents are hoping that a degree from a western college will give them a better chance at finding a job either in the US or China.

As for buying property. The biggest reason is probably diversification and the fact that the Chinese see property as a good investment. Housing prices in China have sky rocketed and many Chinese families have more than one house that they just leave around with no one living in them. Just like how stock investors invest in foreign stocks, Chinese landowners are diversifying their property.

Foreign investors don't want to buy property in China probably because of the pollution problem and the fact that they think that the housing market there is a huge bubble.

The college entrance exam is too brutal for many, and China lacks that many top universities as US

Yes. China pays well, not just for AI researchers, but specialized tech talent in general. They attract workers from Taiwan, Korea, Japan for the better paycheck accordingly, where tech workers aren’t valued as much.

Well, if you marry a Chinese, you can also kiss your security clearance goodbye. I don’t think it matters to most of outside the DC/Virginia area.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569238 and marked it off-topic.

? What exactly did the west grant them? They're catching up after decades of communism, and creeping towards becoming a dictatorship for Xi. That will likely negatively impact their growth far more than the actions (or inactions) of the West.

Does this mean we should all stop using Chinese products like most of the phones made in the USA?

This comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you precisely not to do this, i.e. take threads in generic and inflammatory directions.

We're not interested in ideological battle or flamewars here, and certainly not nationalistic ones.

Edit: since you've done this repeatedly, I've banned this account.

I believe that your pro-western nationalism is evil, because this dualism fails to see the nuance, that american corporatism is just as bad as Chinese state socialism. I up-voted you, however, because you stated your opinion in the open, rather than simply implying it. I'd far rather people like you be open in their belief that this is some sort of situation where one country wins and the other loses.

I, however, believe that whoever wins this battle will be wealthy and powerful. Who-ever wins the race is the enemy. Not just the Chinese, but anyone who attains singularity is the enemy of the rest of humanity.

Even if that AI is open-source, unless there is a clear way for every person to have some level of control over the hardware that it runs on, the AI becomes the enemy of all people who will be disenfranchised by it.

Due to the language barrier, there is a lot of interesting work that we will never "see".

For example I was randomly looking through text recognition competition results and found out Tencent has an AI lab that took first place: http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=1&com=evaluation&task=4.

But I was unable to find any information about them. They have github repos with thousands of stars but the community is entirely in chinese: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn/issues

>Thb, most of the interesting work I've seen has come out of Silicon Valley.

Like, social websites and apps?

>What breakthroughs have come from China?

Like tons of actual innovations in hardware, screens, storage, materials science, manufacturing methods, robotics, biology, and other fields?

Baidu & Deep Speech?

That was actually developed in Silicon Valley though, as that's where Baidu's AI lab is.

Most 'breakthroughs' in AI have come from Canada, not Silicon Valley.

Off the top of my head, didn't ResNet come out of MSRA?

The article says that China is investing heavily in AI now, in reaction to the breakthroughs happening elsewhere. It suggests that breakthroughs over the next decade will be coming from China.

Can you give some examples of these interesting work?

Much of the interesting work is done by Chinese nationals, many of whom feel the startup field in the US is slanted towards white people, so they go back to China and take their knowledge with them.

US research institutes are top-notch, but our casual racism and xenophobia are killing us. Not that the Chinese aren't also racist and xenophobic, but the pendulum of power is definitely swinging back across the Pacific.

Still with all these hurt feelings etc, what breakthrough work has come of out of China?