The opening scene of a brief online documentary by the state-run China Global Television Network shows jaywalkers in Shenzhen getting captured on video, identified and then shamed publicly in real time. The report is supposed to highlight China’s prowess in artificial intelligence (AI), yet it reveals a lesser-known truth: China’s AI is not so much a tool of world domination as a narrowly deployed means of domestic control.
On paper, the US and China appear neck and neck in AI development.
China leads in the share of journal citations — helped by the fact that it also publishes more — while the US is far ahead in the more qualitative metric of cited conference papers, a report compiled by Stanford University showed earlier this year.
So while the world’s most populous country is an AI superpower, investors and China watchers should not put too much stock in the notion that its position is unassailable or that the US is weaker.
By miscalculating the other’s abilities, both superpowers risk overestimating their adversary’s strengths and overcompensating in a way that could lead to a Cold War-style AI arms race.
LIMITED SCOPE
China’s expertise is somewhat limited in scope. AI encompasses many sub-fields, including machine learning, robotics, natural language processing and computer vision. The US has a broad toolkit that is deployed across each of these disciplines and used around the world. China, by contrast, excels mostly in computer vision, an area that helps Beijing build out its surveillance state.
In technical assessments conducted by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Chinese algorithms consistently rate near the top across a series of tests that are akin to surveillance conditions — mug shots, visa photographs and border control images.
Beijing-based SenseTime Group is a standout. CloudWalk Technology Co, founded in 2010 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a team from Beihang University also ranked high in recent examinations of more than 600 entries from around the world.
More than half the papers last year published by Chinese teams were in the disciplines most used in surveillance — computer vision and pattern recognition, data on research papers compiled by Microsoft Academic Graph and analyzed by Chinese media outlet Sixth Tone showed.
Compared with the US, the UK, Germany and India, a smaller proportion of its papers are on machine learning, natural language processing and robotics.
Meanwhile, revenue for AI computer vision firms in China is largely linked to governments and their desire to monitor people.
SenseTime, which is planning an initial public offering in Hong Kong, derived almost half its revenue in the first six months of this year from its “Smart City” business.
Rival Megvii Technology Ltd, which swapped its earlier listing plans in Hong Kong for an upcoming Shanghai debut, relies even more heavily on local government contracts, with 64 percent of its business coming from a similar product suite it calls “City IoT Solutions.”
These projects are largely based on setting up cameras and sensors around a city to track people and vehicles, then using AI software to keep tabs on their movement.
AI technology in the US has many more applications. The US leads in machine learning, a branch of AI that leverages data and algorithms to learn and improve accuracy. Most of the world’s leading and widely adopted frameworks were developed in the US by companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as the University of California, Berkeley.
The best natural language processing engines, used to understand, process and analyze written text, also hail from US tech giants — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and International Business Machines Corp. These tools are used globally for voice recognition in smart speakers, to run chatbots in customer service, improve translation and search results, or detect fraud in the financial industry.
COMMERCIALIZATION
US companies are also leaders in enterprise deployments, where a COVID-19-induced surge in work-from-home usage has driven demand for cloud computing and networking technologies. US firms are also leading in process automation, which is used to replace staff in call centers and customer service.
While these technologies can, and are, used in surveillance by Western powers, their true power lies in their commercial viability. The US asserts its dominance by creating products that help clients around the world become more profitable or efficient. By contrast, SenseTime and Megvii continue to lose money.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has upended supply chains and business models, might be the push China needs to become the AI superpower it hopes to be. Start-ups like Aubo Robotics Technology Co, which makes industrial arms, and UBTech Robotics Inc, a developer of humanoid robots, could become as important to Beijing’s national goals as facial recognition leaders SenseTime and Megvii.
Lee Kai-fu (李開復), chairman of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, said that a shortage of factory and service workers has spurred a massive change in how China views artificial intelligence.
“The pandemic has really in China pushed further the adoption of automation and robotics,” said Lee, who coauthored the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. “The robotic revolution is probably the big step forward that will be helpful to push China’s technologies ahead.”
To take its position as the undisputed leader in AI, China would need to spend less effort finding ways to track people and more on technologies to replace them.
Tim Culpan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. He previously covered technology for Bloomberg News.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS