How China Is Trying to Become the World's Leader in Artificial Intelligence

China's ambitions in artificial intelligence are insatiable. Wary that the Middle Kingdom is trailing the United States (the current leader in the field), government officials outlined a blueprint last summer to make the country the world's uncontested AI power in the next decade. By a host of metrics, China is already tilting the scale. AI-related patent submissions in China almost tripled between 2010 and 2014 compared with the previous five years, while Chinese investments account for 48 percent of global AI startup funding. According to CB Insights, based on keyword searches of abstracts and titles in 2017, China has far outpaced America in AI-related patent publications: for "deep learning," 652 compared with 101; for "artificial intelligence," 641 to 130; for "machine learning," 882 to about 770.