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Not long ago, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said at a hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that the United States may lose its lead in AI in five to 10 years, and China is striving to overtake the United States.

AI is clearly becoming a driver of progress in the global tech industry, and as it becomes more important, more and more countries are elevating AI to the level of national strategy. China’s Development Plan for the Next Generation of ARTIFICIAL Intelligence sets the goal of China’s ai theory, technology and application reaching the world’s leading level by 2030. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a national AI development strategy by 2030, believing that the global leader in artificial intelligence will become the “ruler of the world.”

As the current leader, the United States is facing challenges from all aspects. Among them, China is undoubtedly one of the strongest competitors.

AI development: Who’s on top of the wave

‘China is investing billions of dollars to try to get ahead in artificial intelligence, quantum technology, supercomputing,’ Mr. Schmidt said at the event. In contrast, the US government has lagged behind in investing in AI and needs to increase investment in RESEARCH and development to train a workforce that meets the needs of AI.

In fact, from the perspective of policy, many countries have noticed the importance of ARTIFICIAL intelligence in the future and issued policies and plans in various aspects, trying to seize the dominant position in the new round of international competition.

The National Robotics Program in 2011, the Future of Artificial Intelligence Act in 2017, the “Artificial Intelligence Summit” held by the White House in 2018, and the executive order of the “American Artificial Intelligence Initiative” signed by Trump in 2019, the United States has deployed its national AI strategy from the government, legal, technological and investment aspects. Guiding tech giants such as Google and Amazon to invest in AI research and industrialization;

Japan is also relatively early in AI technology research, and the top priority of its AI industrialization development plan is talent cultivation, according to Japan Robot Strategy: Policy planning, including Vision, Strategy, action Plan, Artificial Intelligence Technology Strategy, and Comprehensive Science and Technology Strategy 2017, reflects Japan’s intention to maintain its advantages in the field of robotics and promote the construction of an intelligent society 5.0.

The DEVELOPMENT of ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology in the European Union is relatively weak. In recent years, a series of development strategies have been issued, such as Horizon 2020 Strategy – Multi-Year Robot Development Strategy Map, EU Artificial Intelligence, etc. In addition, it plans to invest in the establishment of artificial intelligence research center and upgrade artificial intelligence research infrastructure. The EU’s AI policy focuses more on security, privacy, ethics and other aspects.

And China also has a long-term layout and planning in artificial intelligence. In 2017, the “New Generation of ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Development Plan” proposed a three-step strategic goal, which planned that by 2020, the scale of ai core industry will exceed 150 billion yuan, driving the scale of related industries to exceed 1 trillion yuan, keeping pace with the world’s advanced level. Major breakthroughs in basic theories will be achieved by 2025, and artificial intelligence laws and regulations, ethical norms and policy systems will be initially established. By 2030, China will become a major AI innovation center in the world, and form a group of global AI science and technology innovation and talent training bases. This plan stimulated government and corporate investment in AI, and a flood of related policies followed.

The article “Will Chinese AI Lead the World by 2030” published by Nature analyzes the current situation and future of AI in China from the aspects of academic influence, talent situation, prospects and policies. First, in terms of talents, China’s ability to retain talents was strengthened. In addition, after the sino-US trade war, the US built barriers in academic exchanges and openness, which alleviated the situation of local brain drain.

In terms of academic influence, China has been at the top of the list ever since it narrowly overtook the US in contributions to the 2017 AAAI. The acceptance rate of papers in 2020 is firmly in the first place, accounting for 37% of the total submission rate, but there is still a gap in influence.

In the list of 32 global AI unicorns released by CB Insights, a global venture capital research institution, at the beginning of 2019, 10 of them are from China. Although BAT cannot compare with Google, Microsoft and other companies, their further layout in the FIELD of AI will drive the overall development of AI in China from the aspects of business and research.

Baidu’s achievements in autonomous driving open platform Apollo, deep learning open source platform PaddlePaddle and Baidu Brain have promoted the development of Baidu and even China’s AI career. Ali Cloud ET city Brain is currently the world’s largest artificial intelligence public system, achieving triple breakthroughs in urban governance mode, service mode and industrial development.

As Jeffrey Ding of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, a Chinese AI development researcher, puts it: “There is no doubt that China sees AI as the core technology of its time and wants to catch up with the US in this area.”

AI racing between the two main forces of China and the US

China and the United States have never stopped racing in the field of computer development.

The United States developed the Internet much earlier than China. In the ERA of PC and Internet, the United States is hard to shake its position as a global center, while China keeps the attitude of advancing in imitation and learning.

The development of smart phones has changed the situation, and the advent of mobile Internet era has given China’s Internet industry an opportunity to overtake. The popularity of various scenarios of mobile payment application is one of the acceleration of the development of mobile Internet. Now, two-dimensional code payment in China has developed to face recognition and insensitive payment, and the popularity is higher than that of western countries. The growth of e-commerce platforms is one of China’s strengths in this race. Alibaba is already worth as much as America, even if it lags behind Amazon.

5G technology is one of the technologies in which China has a leading position. 130,000 5G base stations have been built in China, with 3 million users, and large-scale networks will be implemented this year, according to the latest report by the China Information and Communication Academy. Huawei’s 5G technology is widely adopted around the world, which also reflects its advanced status in the world.

In terms of industrial advantages, the United States mainly relies on its governance and technological advantages, namely its control over key global network resources and cutting-edge technologies, while China’s rise mainly relies on its huge market size and potential. The Quality of China’s Internet industry, which only relies on market dividends, still needs to be improved. In addition, the United States pays more attention to the transformation of the underlying technology, while China’s innovation is still mostly at the application level, such as client development or the localization of foreign models. The transformation of China’s Internet is an inevitable path and has already begun.

The advent of the era of artificial intelligence has aroused a new round of international competition. It has been several decades since “artificial intelligence” was first proposed in Dartmouth conference in 1956, but its advantages and capabilities have not been gradually reflected and known to people until the 21st century, which is inseparable from the development of computing technology.

With a longer research history and stronger technology, The United States has been early in the development of AI industrialization. From scientific research to practical application and industrialization, the United States has always been in the forefront of the world. Google clearly proposed in its 2017 annual Developer Conference that its development strategy should shift from “mobile first” to “ARTIFICIAL intelligence first”. Microsoft’s annual report for fiscal year 2017 for the first time listed artificial intelligence as the company’s vision.

The research in the field of AI in China began in the 1970s, and the real development is also driven by the development of Internet technology and computing power. As cloud computing technology and the rapid development of the chip processing capabilities, deep learning as a representative of the core of artificial intelligence technology breakthrough, make the image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, etc has been greatly ascend, domestic Internet giant companies increased the artificial intelligence field layout, build a series of open platform of artificial intelligence.

At present, China’s AI research has entered the outbreak period. In the aspect of speech recognition technology, IFLYtek is approaching the qualitative change threshold of 99% interpersonal interaction; In computer vision, Teams from Chinese academia and industry swept the ImageNet image Recognition Competition 2016. According to McKinsey, China’s AI application market is expected to grow by 50 percent year on year, far exceeding the global market’s compound annual growth rate of 20 percent.

In the future, if China wants to achieve qualitative breakthroughs in AI development, it still needs the support of basic scientific research to avoid being stuck. Kristin Shi-Kupfer, a political scientist at the Mercator Center for Chinese Studies, a Berlin-based think tank, said, “The promotion of basic theoretical research will be key to China’s long-term AI goals. Without a real breakthrough in machine learning, AI in China will stagnate.”

Schrodinger’s AI: Did it blow over?

Artificial intelligence was once regarded as the next opportunity to create a billion-dollar giant after the mobile Internet, and the match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol also made the public admire and even fear the ability of AI. The development of AI in various application layers also seems to be in full swing.

The trend of the future development of major enterprises is the landing of the rooted scene, so that AI products are really “useful” : last year, the global shipments of smart speakers are still growing at a rate of 45%, face recognition applications everywhere, security, education, finance, transportation, medical, driverless… More and more AI applications are quietly appearing in these scenarios.

Take face recognition as an example, in 2019, it is this technology that achieved the “out of the circle” from technology to the public. The application of this technology in the face payment, daily attendance, bank account, urban security and other scenes, as well as the popularity of ZAO software AI face change, let people deeply experience the development of this technology. And face recognition from technology to people’s livelihood, it is the computer vision technology in the application of extensive landing, in the past year China has become the largest consumer and provider of computer vision technology.

Start-up companies such as Orion Star began to pay attention to the deep cultivation of vertical application scenarios, and their visual recognition technology was applied to smart office, smart rail transportation, smart home appliances, smart education and other fields. In addition, in the field of computer vision, BigGAN, 3D face modeling, Fast. Ai (Fast, low-cost, high accuracy image model classification training), VID2VID technology (ultra realistic HIGH-DEFINITION video generation AI) and other new research is also promoting the development of more application layers.

However, in the seemingly hot at the same time, there are still venture companies to survive difficult, the head of the enterprise development blocked. By the end of the first half of 2017, more than 50 AI companies announced closure due to capital chain failure, and 90% of THEM were in a loss in 2018. Magic Leap, a star AI company backed by Google and Alibaba, has been exposed to heavy losses, and Anki, the largest consumer robot maker, is facing bankruptcy…

At the same time, the public also found that the current AI is not as versatile as imagined, with many concepts but few implementation. When the enthusiasm waned, many people asked, “Artificial intelligence, blown over?”

Last year’s article “Investors flee AI” seemed to set the tone for the cold winter of the AI industry. Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at New York University, has written an article criticizing the overhyping of AI, saying that it is the overhyping of AI leaders such as Hinton, Ng and Le Cun that has led to the coming of the cold winter. Zhang Bo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also said, “The miracle of AI will not recur in the short term, and the potential of deep learning technology is near the ceiling.”

Is the AI really blown over? In fact, the current development of AI is far from the media imagination and presentation of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, AI has the ability to “think” is not the same as the human mind, from this perspective, AI is indeed overrated. But most people are relatively optimistic about what strong AI will be capable of in the future. This is one of the reasons why many countries are starting to plan AI policies.

It is no longer limited to the competition between global technology giants, but also many countries and regions in the world have begun to compete in the development of ARTIFICIAL intelligence. The development of AI technology and industry may rewrite the international pattern.

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