Why Google Is Opening an Artificial Intelligence Lab in China

Humans don't get to do much with Google in China, where the world's most popular search engine has been unavailable for more than five years. But artificial intelligence is another matter entirely, as Google announced Wednesday plans to open an AI research center in Beijing. While the various Google sites have been unavailable in mainland China ever since the company declined to continue censoring search results, the country's emergence as a global power means Google can't stay out of China entirely. In this case, the focus is on harnessing China's growing dominance of machine learning research, hence the new Google AI China Center. "Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015--and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled," Fei-Fei Li, Google's chief scientist for AI and machine learning, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining the move.