Recently, I picked up Kai-Fu Lee's newest book, AI Superpowers. Kai-Fu Lee is one of the most plugged-in AI investors on the planet, managing over $2 billion between six funds and over 300 portfolio companies in the US and China. With a foothold in both Beijing and Silicon Valley, Lee looks at the power balance between Chinese and US tech behemoths--each turbocharging new applications of deep learning and sweeping up global markets in the process. In this post, I'll be discussing Lee's "Four Waves of AI," an excellent framework for discussing where AI is today and where it's going. I'll also be featuring some of the hottest Chinese tech companies leading the charge, worth watching right now.

The world's most powerful person used to be Vladimir Putin. This year he was defeated by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, according to the Forbes ranking of powerful people who make you question what you've been doing with your life so far. It's safe to say that Mr. Putin knows plenty about power, and he believes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will not only change the world as we know it, but the global balance of power as well. It looks like other world leaders agree, with China and the US fighting for AI supremacy and the EU scrambling to catch up. Real growth is fueled by cold hard cash, so we've put together a list of the 10 biggest artificial intelligence startups in the world by funding.

One of the world's most valuable start-ups got that way by using artificial intelligence to satisfy Chinese internet users' voracious appetite for news and entertainment. Every day, its smartphone app feeds 120 million people personalized streams of buzzy news stories, videos of dogs frolicking in snow, GIFs of traffic mishaps and listicles such as "The World's Ugliest Celebrities." Now the company is discovering the risks involved, under China's censorship regime, in giving the people exactly what they want. The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities. Last week, the Beijing bureau of China's top internet regulator accused Toutiao of "spreading pornographic and vulgar information" and "causing a negative impact on public opinion online," and it ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new marketing buzzword. From self-driving cars to voice assistants, AI has taken the world by storm and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Inside the offices of Toutiao, it's hard to tell you're just outside of Beijing and not in the heart of Silicon Valley. The walls are decorated with stylish graffiti, and there are all the usual perks: a game room, a gym, and a sumptuous cafeteria. But Toutiao doesn't only look the part. The company makes an insanely popular Chinese news aggregation app called Toutiao (meaning "headlines"). Toutiao boasts some 700 million users in China, with more than 68 million active daily users.

With dwindling budgets that require big layoffs, you really can't fault the news industry if it wants to catch a break. And to that end (although this is not so awesome for the news industry's writers), a lot of media outlets are kind of going full AI. Case in point, The Washington Post threw its hat in the AI game when setting it's AI, "Heliograf," to cover the Olympics, writing basic stories and keeping tallies of medal counts. Search engine and news syndication service Toutiao has employed Xiaomingbot, an AI writing robot, to cover the Olympics. Get this: the robot was able to publish 450 articles over the course of the 15-day event.