China Creates National Lab to Lead World in Brain-Like Artificial Intelligence

"China has a fairly deep awareness of what's happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true," says Ng. He points out that Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation and achieved speech recognition accuracy that surpassed humans--but when Google and Microsoft, respectively, did so, the American companies got a lot more publicity. "The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley," says Ng Approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in January, the lab, based in China University of Science and Technology (USTC), aims to develop a brain-like computing paradigm and applications. The university, known for its leading role in developing quantum communication technology, hosts the national lab in collaboration with a number of the country's top research bodies such as Fudan University, Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as Baidu, operator of China's biggest online search engine. Wan Lijun, president of USTC and chairman of the national lab, said the ability to mimic the human brain's ability in sorting out information will help build a complete AI technology development paradigm.