6 Reasons Why China Will Lead In AI

There have been only two Chinese researchers out of 289 elected as Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), "but the number of Chinese AI researchers is growing unbelievably fast," said Lee. "There is no data like more data," Lee quoted AI pioneer Fred Jelinek. Most of the AI algorithms are open source and well-known, he said, you just need a few smart people to tweak them. Companies such as Facebook and Google owe their success to a virtuous cycle: More data leads to a product that is better trained with AI which leads to more users and making more money, enabling the hiring of more scientists and the acquisition of more machines, processing and mining even more data. As Lee pointed out, the data gap between the US and China is "dramatically larger" than the actual gap between the respective populations or the number of active mobile users. Chinese use their phones to pay for goods 50 times more often than Americans, he says, and orders for food delivery are 10 times greater than in the US. All of this is data available for training AI models. "China is leapfrogging the way mobile is and should be used," says Lee. US used to have the best payment infrastructure in the world--credit cards. But China got the chance to leapfrog, says Lee, with mobile payments: frictionless, peer to peer, instantaneous. This mobile infrastructure and all the applications built on top of it generate lots of data feeding into the AI virtuous cycle.