US Weighs Restricting Chinese Investment In Artificial Intelligence (reuters.com) 64
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds. An unreleased Pentagon report, viewed by Reuters, warns that China is skirting U.S. oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS review.
Bet on black (Score:1)
9 out of 10 times such "insider reports" are leaked as a tacit innuendo "lobby firms not paying enought"
Last time the US tried (Score:1)
How that policy works out with super computers and space crafts?
Re:Last time the US tried (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shortsighted policy: instead of the Chinese investing money in US research, they'll invest money in Chinese research.
The end result is they'll get the technology they want, and the US won't get the benefits of the research. That's how we ended up with China having manned spaceflight capabilities while the US doesn't, and how we ended up with China having the most powerful supercomputers.
Re:Last time the US tried (Score:5, Interesting)
I think NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin would disagree with you.
SpaceX isn't man-rated. BO can't even get to orbit, and NASA doesn't have rockets.
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You think wrong. Currently, neither NASA nor any private launch company in the US has the ability to launch people into space. SpaceX is closing in on it, but they need a number of successful launches before their rockets are man rated, and probably even more to get the capsule man rated. That's why we rely on Russian rockets to put our astronauts into space right now.
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We don't have manned spaceflight capabilities??? I think NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin would disagree with you.
At present the last manned flight launched by the US was six years ago. Quite clearly we actually don't currently possess manned spaceflight capability. That's slated to change in a big way next year, but those chickens are most definitely not hatched yet.
You might argue that a seven year hiatus was a smart strategic decision that made the best use of limited budget as lower cost alternatives literally got off the ground, and I'd agree with you. But depending on the Russians for seven years was the kind o
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It's been addressed by other replies, but:
I think NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin would disagree with you.
NASA has been paying Russia to put its astronauts in orbit for years
SpaceX has never launched somebody to orbit and probably won't for at least another few years
Blue Origin has never launched an orbital rocket at all, let alone a manned one.
Re: Last time the US tried (Score:2)
I am old, so this is a bit archaic but salient. Way back in ye olden days, we had a saying. It seems appropriate. 'The more the Soviet Union looks like America, the more America looks like the Soviet Union.'
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The crypto export bans [wikipedia.org] of the 1990s were also extremely damaging. The main effect, besides turning t-shirts into munitions, was that companies did much of their crypto development outside the USA.
This proposed law would likely have the same effect. AI research would migrate out of America. Politics should be implemented as an LSTM RNN [wikipedia.org] so we can remember failures and avoid repeating them.
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AI is a joke anyway, nothing new for decades in that field other than more horsepower available for same old algorithms. nothing much of value lost
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A lot more horsepower, deeper network, better algorithms, and better understanding.
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Here's a long list of improvements invented over the years, a lot of them fairly recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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sorry, neural nets of many layers are decades old tech. none of the those lists of theorems in the 1990s changed what could be done with the nets. we can throw more horsepower at the problem is all.
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The US is the most business and investment friendly country on the planet.
Actually, Singapore and Hong Kong are consistently rated as more business friendly [worldbank.org].
Low taxes, low energy prices, cheap infrastructure in the form of affordable land and office space
If those were so important, American AI labs would be in Louisiana rather than California.
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It is politics. As only complete morons that are unable to listen to experts go into politics, of course it makes no sense.
Thank heavens! (Score:2)
We wouldn't want them to steal our state of the art Ms. Pac Man playing AI [gizmodo.com]. Our Atari 2600 high scores are safe for a while longer thanks to our government!
China is under Nuclear weapon threat (Score:1)
Chinese strategy since mid-200x (Score:5, Insightful)
Chinese strategy since mid-200x: seal new economic opportunities, let the enemy run out of possible moves.
Rare earth metal mining, and all of new industries orbiting it - nuked mid 200x
"Big solar" - went throught "slash and burn" acquisition
Battery tech - again, all worthy companies got sold to Chinese before they had an opportunity to make a dent on Chinese battery monopoly
"New nuclear" - in Chinese pocket since 2015
The entire field of bioinformatics eaten by China before it even had a chance to emerge
This list can go on for few pages
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I agree.
The US has fallen behind and is now a "has been" country like (formerly) Great Britain.
China is the leader in innovation and technology.
Now that Trump has taken us out of the renewable energy business, the Chinese takeover of that field is complete. They already produce 2/3 of the world's solar panels and half the windmills plus almost all of the new nuclear.
We're toast.
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Well, to be fair, the UK was already a "has been" before it joined the EU and got propped up. Apparently they now think they were on the right path back then and want to continue the downward way. The US is a bit newer in the club of "has beens", but this has been obvious for at least a decade or so as well.
I don't think China is the leader though. They are pretty mediocre in most areas. That puts them vastly ahead of the US, but behind the EU. (And no, the EU is not being overrun by barbarian hordes at the
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Now that Trump has taken us out of the renewable energy business
If it needed subsidies to survive we were never in the business to begin with. If it isn't profitable it isn't a business per se.
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The problem is that we are giving subsidies to fossil fuels. They need subsidies to survive and Trumps friends in the fossil fuel business are tapping him for subsidies.
Renewables can compete on a level field. Solar and wind are cheaper (unsubsidized) than coal and gas.
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Well then the solution is to stop giving subsidies to fossil fuels. Corporate welfare.
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What you overlook is the little fact of _why_ they can do it. The problem is that the US economy of completely borked and, as a result, the Chinese have money to spend. A lot of it.
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Japan used to try this where the gov't heavily subsidized new industries. It usually didn't pan out. For example, they spent billions perfecting high-def analog video. But digital came along and ended the analog video market.
We hear about China's successes, but I'm sure there's a lot of failures that are suppressed. Socialized R&D has a mixed record.
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Actually, there is no race about strong AI. All experts in the field currently think that it cannot be done at all or would at least require a fundamental theoretical breakthrough (which you cannot accelerate and that is nowhere in sight).
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All experts ? Please post some links to the research of a couple of these top experts.
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Yes, that would be interesting. Of course, no actual experts are going to disgrace themselves this way.
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More to the point, Please post some links to the research of top experts who currently think it _is_ within our grasp!
No, not more to the point. There's a big gap beween "within our grasp" and "it cannot be done". I don't believe it's in our grasp yet, but we're making good progress.
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you're confused, you are the one asserted the existence of something that does not.
AI is stagnant but for increased horsepower. Whether talking about symbolic AI, neural nets, genetic algorithms...all done decades ago
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Indeed. And there are a lot of areas that would benefit hugely from the general intelligence a human moron has. Cannot be done at this time and is not even on the distant horizon as there is no credible theory how it could be done.
The AI fanatics are blind and stupid.
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You're confused. I never said anything about strong AI. But gweihir claims that "all experts" believe it's (near) impossible.
I just wanted to hear that out of the mouths of these experts.
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1984 as a description of utopia.
The date is a bit off. Try 2:14 a.m. EDT on August 29, 1997.
Maybe don't scare off scientists? (Score:4, Funny)
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That would mean getting rid of a major part of the population as well. You cannot fix stupid.
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...and the last time restrictions worked was when? (Score:1)
So I just wonder who stands to profit from restricting Chinese investments from coming to America? It makes no sense, if somebody wants to invest in you, you don't run away.
Americans are happily *consuming* everything that is produced in China and they are consuming on *credit* that is handed to them by the Chinese. So apparently it is good enough for Americans to *borrow for consumption* but borrowing savings for investment is not OK.
Who stands to benefit from this restriction financially? Well, governm
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They never worked. They usually made things worse. But this is politics, whether something works is unimportant, it only matters whether something sounds good to the ignorant masses.
Chinese lunch buffet (Score:1)
Let's just hope General Tso doesn't adopt both drone and AI technology. The buffet will never be the same. A vwery verwy intwesting devewupment.