How China Hopes to Shape the Future of AI

This past May, China announced its AI roadmap for the next three years: The National Development and Reform Commission expects their artificial intelligence sector will give them a market worth topping 100 billion yuan (that's 15.26 billion) within that time period. Where is China's AI sector at now, and what steps could plausibly deliver that strong a return by 2019? Tech.Co had a chat with Luke Tang, General Manager of global entrepreneurship company TechCode, who drew on his experience working with AI companies worldwide to detail China's unique opportunities. Here are the biggest takeaways on AI in China. "China has already got a great start in both research and business applications in AI -- right behind the U.S. […] On the research side, the White House recently published a report showing that China has now surpassed the U.S. in total papers and citations published in Deep Learning or Neural Network, a crucial area in AI, but overall both the U.S. and China are way ahead of other countries. In fact, author's names with Chinese-origin represent about 50 percent of the articles published yearly in Deep Learning. Of course, there are other keywords one can use to search, e.g. computer vision, autonomous cars, natural language processing, etc. but it's very clear that the two leading countries in AI research are U.S. and China. This is actually very surprising to me, since China is not usually very strong in other fundamental sciences or computer science areas."