China has been often touted as the fastest emerging hub for AI development, even surpassing the superpowers such as the USA in the emerging tech. Chinese companies and government are taking the analytics and AI play quite seriously, bringing newer and favourable policies around its adoption. Numbers suggest that in 2018, 60 per cent of total global AI investments poured into China with investments from VCs, private equity and the Chinese government. Not just the companies but educational institutes are taking AI seriously as many schools are teaching AI courses to make its citizens AI-ready. There is no doubt that China has been serious about its AI strategy, but is its power and supremacy in artificial intelligence real or exaggerated?

Is AI over-hyped in 2017? Whether or not artificial intelligence (AI) is overhyped depends upon which community you are talking about. If you are talking about the academic research community, its not over-hyped. There have been major breakthroughs in AI over the past couple of years, and the celebration is certainly justified. In my own area of object recognition, we went from 35% accuracy (mean average precision on Pascal VOC) to above 65% in just 3-4 years.

Worldwide spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems is predicted to increase 59.3% year-over-year to reach $12.5 billion by the end of 2017, according to an International Data Corporation (IDC) spending guide. That number is forecast to almost quadruple by 2020, when spending on AI is predicted to reach more than $46 billion. If "personalization" was the marketing buzzword of 2016, then 2017 is the year of "artificial intelligence." As more cloud vendors tout their own AI systems, however, could AI be over-hyped? Joe Stanhope, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says a cultural dissonance exists with AI, thanks to science fiction, and that many people have a preconceived notion about what artificial intelligence really is.