China might soon be an AI powerhouse

While China's government has said that it plans to lead the world in AI by the year 2030. American businessman and software engineer Eric Schmidt explained it how it could be possible by 2030. He explained it "China will be at par with the U.S. year 2020, by the year 2025 they will be better than us and they will dominate the AI industry by the end of 2030."

Reasons everyone believes China will be the AI superpower

At present US might be leading the world AI industry, but China has already started to overpower U.S. in terms of start-up funding and the global economic growth. According to the numbers which don't lie- when it comes to AI start-up funding for the year 2017 China accounted for 48 percent of that funding while America was at 38 percent. China is predicted to account for over 35 percent of global economic growth from 2017 to 2019 which will be almost the double of the US GDP which is predicted to be around 18 percent.

China has one of the largest data sets in the world and the entrepreneurs who are ready to create spearhead algorithms for it. With billions in funds and venture capital investments the city of Beijing has already deployed government officials who will look over the research and entrepreneurship around AI. According to an estimate China's investment in AI is around $300Billion.

Some factors that will help China be a powerhouse in AI

Data quantity

China is a big country and surely has the biggest population. These billions of people create abundant data which is enough for it to outnumber almost all of the Europe and outstrips the US. What China has that the western hemisphere does not have is the boom in online to offline start-ups, this has given China an advantage by creating new layers of intelligence data. Even China's mobile payment system has overtaken US not only in the data department but also in the worth generated from this system.

Eager Entrepreneurs

Andrew Ng a former founder director of Google Brain said "The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley. When you spot a business opportunity in China, the window of time you have to respond is very short." China has an environment that has given ways to the AI start-ups; they now have the three of the seven AI giants namely Baidu, Alibaba and Tecent. For the longest of time China had was stuck in its copycat era. But as China's AI expertise has exploded and the start-ups have learned to tailor American copycat products to a Chinese audience, these entrepreneurs are finally shrugging off their former 'copycat' reputation.

Expertise of AI

While US was ruling the world of AI, China was not even breaking the top layer. China has quickly closed to gap on its competitor US, an equal number of papers were accepted from US and China based researchers at the AAAI's 2017 conference. China's Face++ now leads the world in face and image recognition AI, beating out top teams from Google, Microsoft and Facebook at the 2017 COCO image-recognition competition. Voice recognition software company iFlyTek has not only outcompeted teams from Alphabet's DeepMind, Facebook and IBM Watson in natural-language processing, but has done so in its second language" of English.

Government taking the charge

China's government has already made its plan clear about becoming the global centre of AI innovation and has planned to reach $150 billion industry by 2030. The thing that makes China different from other countries is when China's government speaks everyone listens. Because of this China surpassed US in AI venture funding. China's government is flooding the market with AI-targeted funds as Chinese tech giants and adrenalized start-ups rise to leverage this capital. China's political system is set up such that local officials are incentivized to out compete others for leadership in CCP initiatives, each striving to lure in AI companies and entrepreneurs with generous subsidies and advantageous policies.

Source: HOB

Share This On

Previous Story Next Story

Latest News Feed