Seeking to outsmart US, China races ahead on artificial intelligence
Seeking to outsmart US, China races ahead on artificial
intelligence
BY TIM JOHNSON February 21, 2018 05:00 AM Updated
February 21, 2018 03:13 PM
WASHINGTON When a Google computer program beat the
world’s best player of an ancient Chinese board game last May, it might have
seemed like an incremental milestone.
But for some, the success of the program known as AlphaGo
marked more than a man vs. machine clash. It set up a broader race between
China and the United States over artificial intelligence, a competition that
could mold the future of humankind just as the widespread arrival of
electricity did in the last century.
The Go tournament took place in Wuzhen, a city of canals
that is more than 1,300 years old, a fitting venue for a competition involving
the strategy board game Go that has been played for several thousand years. Go
is renowned for its complexity, and it is said that there are more variations to
the game than there are atoms in the universe.
Perhaps it was a coincidence of timing, but the AlphaGo
competition kicked off events that demonstrated China’s resolve to close the
gap with — and quickly surpass — the United States in deploying artificial
intelligence, or AI. Goals Chinese authorities announced last July are
ambitious: Reach parity with the United States by 2020, achieve major
breakthroughs by 2025, and “occupy the commanding heights of AI technology by
2030” as the world’s undisputed leader.
Can China do it? Experts say the race is in its early
stages but the challenge has been set, and China is taking action to move
toward its aspirations.
“There’s a lot of ambition, a lot of enthusiasm but it
still remains to be seen whether this is possible,” said Elsa B. Kania, a
specialist in artificial intelligence and Chinese defense innovation at the
Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. Nonetheless,
she added, “there is a very real chance and possibility” that China could
achieve its goals.
The stakes are high. Advances in artificial intelligence
could add trillions of dollars to a major economy and give an edge on the
battlefield, shifting empires and global power.
“For the moment, the United States is the most advanced
AI country in the world. But that gap is closing,” said Chris Nicholson, chief
executive of Skymind, a San Francisco start-up that focuses on deep learning, a
type of artificial intelligence.
Russia, too, is paying attention, although it is not in
the same tier as China and the U.S.
“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for
Russia, but for all humankind,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin told students
Sept. 1, according to the state-run RT network. “Whoever becomes the leader in
this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
Processors equipped with artificial intelligence
algorithms and specialized hardware platforms learn from experience, adapt to
new information and perform human-like tasks. The field is in its relative
infancy, and numbers of top scientists are limited. Google, the Mountain View,
California, technology giant, employs at least half of the top 100 of them, the
Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk consultancy, estimated in a
report in December.
But China has some comparative advantages, and it is
moving fast. Last year, its scientists sought 641 patents related to artificial
intelligence, compared with 130 in the United States, says CB Insights, a
venture capital database company.
Other metrics also show China’s push. Every year, top
experts gather for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence. In 2012, U.S. researchers presented 41 percent of the papers at
the meeting, and Chinese experts barely hit 10 percent, said Avi Goldfarb, a
professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of
Management.
In 2017, he said, U.S. share of papers fell to 34 percent
and China’s grew to 23 percent.
“What’s really happened is that China has invested a lot
and done much better,” said Goldfarb, co-author of Prediction Machines: The
simple economics of Artificial Intelligence.
One of China’s comparative advantages in artificial
intelligence is the massive data that the government and large internet
companies collect on the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens.
In China, people use their mobile phones to pay for goods
50 times more often than in the United States, says Sinovation Ventures, an
early stage venture capital firm with offices in China and the United States.
Chinese order 10 times more food delivery volume than in the United States. And
shared bicycle usage is 300 times that of the United States, the company says.
“All of that is data that goes back to train AI models,”
Kai-fu Lee, Sinovation’s founder and a former Google executive, told an MIT
forum Nov. 2 on the future of work.
A Chinese bike-sharing company, Mobike, has fleets in 200
cities globally. Its sensor-equipped bikes transmit 20 terabytes of data for
Mobike to analyze with artificial intelligence every day.
China’s government has moved heavily into facial
recognition software designed to keep tabs on the populace. It has done so
through unique levels of partnership with private Chinese tech companies, like
Yitu Tech, one of many big firms that cooperate closely with authorities.
Lee, the former Google executive, said massive datasets
give China an upper hand.
“A very good scientist with a ton of data will beat a
super scientist with a small amount of data any day,” Lee told the MIT forum.
Given such an advantage, venture capital money is pouring
into China-based startups pursuing aspects of artificial intelligence. Such
startups took 48 percent of all dollars going to AI startups globally in 2017,
surpassing the United States for share of dollars, CB Insights says.
While competition to harness artificial intelligence is
real, it is unlike the race to develop a nuclear bomb before and during World War
II. A remarkable degree of commercial overlap occurs between the two countries,
and some experts don’t see an inevitable winner and loser in the competition.
“There’s a lot connectivity between Beijing and Shanghai
and Hangzhou and (Silicon) Valley,” said Paul S. Triolo, director of global
technology at Eurasia Group.
Microsoft and Google have large operations involved in
artificial intelligence research in China, he said, “and Chinese companies like
Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent have lots of AI researchers working in the U.S.
Who’s winning that?”
“It’s not a race to build the first nuclear weapon. It’s
a set of very diffuse capabilities that are used as part of bigger systems,”
Triolo said.
The extent of how artificial intelligence might impact
everyday life is not yet known. One prominent expert, Andrew Ng, a former chief
scientist at Baidu who now heads a research group at Stanford University,
compares the transformative power of AI to electricity, noting how electrical
refrigeration transformed agriculture, the electric motor remade manufacturing
and the telegraph revolutionized communications.
“If it is like electricity, it can transform economies,
societies and militaries in ways that we can imagine and ways that we probably
can’t imagine yet,” Kania said.
The potential has seized the attention of the People’s
Liberation Army, which makes little secret that it sees artificial intelligence
as augmenting China’s power. Military commanders paid close attention last year
to the contest surrounding AlphaGo, which was developed by a Google subsidiary,
DeepMind, based in London.
“The PLA wants an AlphaGo for warfare,” Kania said.
One way that artificial intelligence may be deployed is
in swarm warfare — the use of scores maybe hundreds of flying or undersea
drones to disrupt enemy ships and submarines.
Such fleets of drones, harnessed with the right
algorithms, could be used “to overwhelm and saturate very high-value weapons
platforms,” Kania said, like aircraft carriers.
“We’re entering a new age of warfare where AI and
robotics will be much more integral to military power,” she said, noting that
battlefield action might become so rapid that “humans can’t keep up.”
China has put some of its prowess on display. In an
exhibition Dec. 7, a swarm of 1,180 drones took part in a nighttime flyover
light show over the southern city of Guangzhou, spelling out “hello” and
“innovation” to visiting dignitaries. Intel, the U.S. tech giant, flew more
than 1,200 illuminated drones this month for the opening of the Pyeongchang
Olympic Games.
As China makes headway, some U.S. experts voice concern,
even alarm.
“I’m assuming that our lead will continue over the next
five years, and that China will catch up extremely quickly,” Eric Schmidt,
then-executive chairman of Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., said at a forum in
November.
But Schmidt lamented what he saw as a lack of a U.S.
governmental focus on how to forge ahead robustly in artificial intelligence.
“We don’t have a national strategy,” Schmidt said. “If
you believe that this is important – as I suspect all of us do, but certainly I
believe – then we need to get our act together as a country.”
Forecasters can only estimate the economic impact of
artificial intelligence, but when they do the numbers are extraordinary. PwC, a
global management consultancy, said in a study last year that artificial
intelligence could add $7 trillion to the Chinese economy and $3.7 trillion to
the North American economy by 2030.
It would impact areas such as self-driving cars, improved
imaging diagnostics, better fraud detection, efficient energy consumption,
greater tailoring of apparel and consumer items, and personalized delivery of
entertainment.
Industry experts are appealing to lawmakers to sustain
the current U.S. edge.
“AI is the biggest economic and technological revolution
to take place in our lifetime. … We can’t afford to allow other countries to
overtake us,” Ian Buck, vice president for accelerated computing at Nvidia, a
Santa Clara, California, manufacturer of circuits used in super-fast
processing, said in prepared remarks to a House subcommittee Feb. 14.
Nicholson, the San Francisco entrepreneur, said the Trump
administration has cut research and development programs, blocked
mathematicians from the Middle East and curtailed foreign investment in areas
like artificial intelligence.
“The United States is adopting policies that will make it
lose this race,” he said.
Comments
Post a Comment