China poised to climb artificial intelligence rankings

BEIJING (CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - China may be ranked seventh globally when it comes to the number of professionals working in the cutting-edge industry of artificial intelligence (AI), but the country is predicted to climb the rankings in the next decade. More than 50,000 AI technical professionals are working in China. India, Britain, Canada, Australia and France took second to sixth place in the rankings, according to the report based on LinkedIn user data. "The core technique of AI is closely related to computer science, in which the US has maintained an absolute advantage in the past 20 years," said LinkedIn China's vice-president Wang Di. Researcher Li Hui at the Shanghai Institute for Science of Science said that AI talent in the US is mainly concentrated in such primary technical fields as chips, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and imaging, and far surpasses its Chinese counterparts in numbers. The LinkedIn report found that about one in six employees in the field in the US were born before 1970, compared with only one in 25 in China.