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Thought Leadership

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Otto Schell
China upfront in artificial intelligence

Chances are good that China will position itself as the world leader in artificial intelligence. This assumption is based on numerous indications.

  1. There are more young engineers in China who deal with artificial intelligence than anywhere else in the world. The number of Chinese publications related to this topic has doubled in the last ten years. In a competition for facial recognition, the Chinese startup Face++ has won against the teams of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon University.
  2. China collects more data than the USA – and data (big data) is the essential condition for any form of artificial intelligence. Chinese people use their smart phones more intensively then Americans to pay almost everything in their daily life: apparel, food, electricity, water, etc. The bicycles, that are available for common use, generate 30 Terabytes of sensory data from around 50 millions uses per day. In comparison to the USA, this represents 300 times more data volume.
  3. China is gradually leaving its “copy phase”. 15 years ago, almost all Chinese startups have copied their American models as accurately as possible. In the meantime, they have taken the lead – WeChat and Weibo are working much better than their counterparts Facebook Messenger or Twitter. Also, China has started to create its own ideas.
  4. The Chinese government encourages and supports the development of artificial intelligence with two clear objectives: to catch up with the US in 2020 and to take the lead over the US in 2030. Experience in the past have shown that the Chinese government has always been quite assertive in all their infrastructure projects. There is considerable evidence that this also applies to the project “artificial intelligence”.