This may be surprising to many U.S. observers and attendees as they are eager to capitalize on recent advances in the AI arena, especially when such predictions come from Kai-fu Lee and his AI development in North America and China In 1988, Kai-Fu Lee obtained a Ph.D. in AI (Speech Recognition) from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and worked successively at Apple, SGI, Microsoft and Google, where he worked in Beijing in 2009 Established venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.
In his speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kai-fu Lee concluded: 'In the AI era, it is inevitable that a dual monopoly of the two giants of the United States and China will be formed, and this future has begun to take shape.' This is a valid conclusion, It brings together a wealth of evidence that China is beyond catching up and becoming the number one in the world of AI.The following is a summary of Kai-Fu Lee's argument about the rise of AI in China, cites six reasons:
1. Lots of Talent Only 2 out of 289 researchers selected as' AAAI 'are Chinese, but Kai stressed:' The number of AI researchers in China is growing at an alarming rate. In the 100 Journal / Conference Best AI Papers, the percentage of Chinese researchers rose from 23.2% in 2006 to 42.8% in 2015, with the percentage of cited papers rising from 25.5% to 55.8%.
Face ++, a facial recognition startup in China, won first place in three computer vision challenges when facing teams from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and CMU. AAAI delayed the 2017 annual meeting by one week because it found the convention dates Coincides with the Chinese New Year, and the number of papers from researchers in China and the United States is almost equal.
2. LARGE DATA Lee Kai-fu quoted AI pioneer, Cornell University professor Fred Jelinek as saying: "No data actually means more data." Kai-fu Lee said that most AI algorithms are Open source, and as we all know, you only need a few smart people to adjust them.The success of companies such as Facebook and Google is due to a virtuous circle: more data leads to better products and trained AI, which in turn leads to more Multi-user, earn more money, which in turn allows them to recruit more scientists, acquire more machines, and process and mine more data.
As pointed out by Kai-Fu Lee, the data gap between the United States and China is significantly larger than the actual gap between the two countries (or the number of active mobile phone users) .He said that Chinese people use mobile phones to pay for goods as many as Americans 50 times, and product orders are 10 times the United States.All of these can serve as training AI model data.
Kai-fu Lee said: 'China is moving and using the way to go beyond.' The United States in the past has the world's best payment infrastructure - credit card, but Kai-fu Lee said that China has the opportunity to leapfrog mobile payment, this approach has no Friction, peer-to-peer, real-time, etc. This mobile infrastructure and all applications based on it generate a wealth of data that can be used to support AI training throughout the cycle.
3. Useful Innovation Among MIT's Distinguished Lecture series, Robert Buderi and George T. Huang, in their 2006 book, The Art of Relationships: Microsoft , China and Bill Gates' plan to? Win the road ahead, wrote that students had asked Kai-Fu Lee to leave a sentence as a 'famous quote' The book said: 'Kai - fu Lee recalled that the first thing I thought of is that what is really important is not innovation, but useful innovation.'
This is the situation in China now, but the days of imitation are over, but Kai-fu Lee said that plagiarism taught entrepreneurs how to make products and they became good product managers and then they quickly moved to the next stage, 'when they were exposed Therefore, 'Weibo is a better product than Twitter, as is Taobao, eBay, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. The better the function, the stronger the business model.' '
Today, Chinese companies are emerging with a large number of innovative products that have not even been seen in the United States, such as tailor-made news or using 'under-paid American teachers' to teach English in order to create distance education. "Kai-fu Lee said:' We are now entering Times copied from China.
4. The Competitive Experience Historian Alfred Chandler once wrote that the size and scope of the American firm thrived in the great American market of the nineteenth century and succeeded worldwide in the twentieth century Japanese companies did not have the scale and scope of experience in the relatively small-scale domestic market but their competitive skills were honed domestically until they conquered the world market in the second half of the 20th century.In the United States, The scale is much greater than ever before, and there is no competition in the country.
Kai-fu Lee said that China provides a 'quick start and rapid iteration of the favorable environment' compared with the United States, the domestic public less concerned about data privacy, less consensus on moral issues.He said: 'People more Is a vision that focuses on execution, focusing on a unique goal and a company that often includes a global ambition.
5. Government Support Face ++ mentioned above recently raised $ 460 million in C-round financing in China led by the Capital Venture Investment Fund, which raised funds from the Chinese government to 3,530 Billion, compared with 146 billion U.S. dollars and 129 million U.S. dollars respectively in 2015 and 2014. Kai-fu Lee said: "The government has become a limited partner in venture capital funds and is willing to accept a lower return than other partners. Encouraged by top venture capitalists, they can take government money, spend less time raising money and spending more time building great companies, inspired by the practices of Israel and Singapore, which is a wise move. '
Most importantly, the government funds have a clear policy guidance from the government, and Kai-fu Lee said the Chinese government supports science and technology, supports tests and supports speed instead of using policies to block them. In July last year, the State Council announced that by 2020 China will be at AI technology and applications to catch up and become 'the world's leading AI innovation center' by 2030. Kai-fu Lee compared this' very straightforward way 'with the 2016 AI report by the Obama administration saying that the latter's' long-term resources, Regulatory, ethical issues such as rational thinking.
Kai-fu Lee also pointed out that China had vowed to become the world leader in high-speed railways in 2010. Six years later, 60% of the world's high-speed trains were deployed in China, and in 2015 the Chinese government announced a project called ' And the Innovation Campaign, to make everybody in China an entrepreneur, said Kai-Fu Lee, which currently has 8,000 incubators / accelerators in China (1,700 in 2014), and 89,000 startups have graduated from these incubators.
6. The Spirit of Adventure Chinese consumers, many companies and even government agencies have the adventures, the trials, and the bold adventures that were evident in Kai-Fu Lee's conversation, especially when he ventured to predict the future of the economic digital transformation (Four stages) 'when.
In the first wave, the company successfully exploited the online data, and Kai-fu Lee predicted that 'China's Internet companies (BATs) will outperform their counterparts in the United States.' Not only because they take the lead in mobile and payment but also because they 'Unfettered by antitrust laws and very tenacious in expansion, each of them is becoming a bank, insurance company, etc.'
In the second wave, the company succeeded by developing and selling commercial data software.With the difference between the United States and the United States, the large traditional Chinese enterprises 'never worry about data warehouses that contain important content,' while China lags behind the United States in this respect Kai - fu Lee said: 'But the government is promoting the development of Chinese enterprises, they may have the opportunity to catch up.
In the third wave, 'China will overtake the United States in digitizing the real world' due to the volume of data, consumer privacy concerns and cheaper hardware. "Kai-fu Lee said similar to the Amazon smart speaker Echo products sold in China The price is only 15 dollars.
The fourth wave is about fully automated, just as driverless cars and robots do. In Kai-fu Lee's assessment, the United States is far ahead in terms of technology, which means that two years is a long time.But in the government's support Chinese companies are growing faster, so we'll see who eventually becomes the leader and currently Chinese companies have a 50% chance.
But when it comes to retail automation or automated stores, Kai-fu Lee is more optimistic about the advantages of Chinese enterprises Amazon buy all-food supermarkets? Kai-fu Lee asserted: 'We think this is a very primitive activity' Although he admitted that the most advanced Amazon Technology, but in China, 'auto shop is everywhere.' It's part of a bigger trend, Online-Merges-with-Offline (OMO), a fusion of the digital and the real world, which Kai said will affect education And many other areas.
Kai-fu Lee said that if you go to China in about a year or so, half of the shopping will be done in the automatic or semi-automatic store, he said: 'This is the speed of Chinese companies to deploy products, arbitrary, competitive and bold, this spirit will promote China to Before becoming a powerful AI force. "Kai-fu Lee once said:" My dad always felt that China was not aware of its own potential. "However, China is now realizing that it is possible to become a leader in many fields, including AI .