China's Alibaba is Investing Huge Sums in AI Research and Resources -- and It Is Building Tools To Challenge Google and Amazon (technologyreview.com) 30
Alibaba is already using AI and machine learning to optimize its supply chain, personalize recommendations, and build products like Tmall Genie, a home device similar to the Amazon Echo. China's two other tech supergiants, Tencent and Baidu, are likewise pouring money into AI research. The government plans to build an AI industry worth around $150 billion by 2030 and has called on the country's researchers to dominate the field by then. But Alibaba's ambition is to be the leader in providing cloud-based AI. From a report: Like cloud storage (think Dropbox) or cloud computing (Amazon Web Services), cloud AI will make powerful resources cheaply and readily available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, enabling new kinds of businesses to grow. The real race in AI between China and the US, then, will be one between the two countries' big cloud companies, which will vie to be the provider of choice for companies and cities that want to make use of AI. And if Alibaba is anything to go by, China's tech giants are ready to compete with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft to serve up AI on tap. Which company dominates this industry will have a huge say in how AI evolves and how it is used.
[...] There have been other glimpses of Alibaba's progress in AI lately. Last month a research team at the company released an AI program capable of reading a piece of text, and answering simple questions about that text, more accurately than anything ever built before. The text was in English, not Chinese, because the program was trained on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a benchmark used to test computerized question-and-answer systems. [...] One advantage China's tech companies have over their Western counterparts is the government's commitment to AI. Smart cities that use the kind of technology found in Shanghai's metro kiosks are likely to be in the country's future. One of Alibaba's cloud AI tools is a suite called City Brain, designed for tasks like managing traffic data and analyzing footage from city video cameras.
[...] There have been other glimpses of Alibaba's progress in AI lately. Last month a research team at the company released an AI program capable of reading a piece of text, and answering simple questions about that text, more accurately than anything ever built before. The text was in English, not Chinese, because the program was trained on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a benchmark used to test computerized question-and-answer systems. [...] One advantage China's tech companies have over their Western counterparts is the government's commitment to AI. Smart cities that use the kind of technology found in Shanghai's metro kiosks are likely to be in the country's future. One of Alibaba's cloud AI tools is a suite called City Brain, designed for tasks like managing traffic data and analyzing footage from city video cameras.
AI is the new battleground! (Score:1)
The future looks ultra cool and ultra scary at the same time!
Thats me! (Score:1)
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If you have any questions about it, let me know!
I have questions about it. Just letting you know.
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...exciting field...any questions...
What AI accomplishment has excited you the most? There always seem to be neat new advances in the area. I don't think we'll ever have "real AI" to satisfy the people who demand that the machine achieve sentience, but that shouldn't distract from impressive machine learning advances.
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The one where it becomes self-aware and kills all humans for the greater good.
I prefer "expert system" to AI (Score:1)
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AI is the buzzword for late 2017 and 2018 now.
Previously Cloud was the buzzword, maybe in some areas crypto or blockchain is the thing but AI has more traction with the general populace I think.
Now we just need a beowulf cluster of blockchain based AI clouds and we win the game right?
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I think you forgot Internet of Things. You collect data with IoT, store it in the cloud, verify it with a blockchain, analyze it with AI. And of course build a cryptocoin for people to pay each other for their data and analytics. Connect that IoT with 5G and you're covered all the way to 2019 with them buzzwords. Much buzz. Very AI.
Will it be like Amazon's AI... (Score:1)
that decided after I bought a chainsaw that I'm now starting a chainsaw collection?
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Look back at fighter design from the 60s. Latest modern fighters will share a lot of factors simply because that is the state of the art at the time.
China has been cheating for some time but that is a dangerous pillow to sleep on because so was Japan in car manufacturing. Now, nobody I know would willingly buy an American car when they could buy Japanese.
Issue of Trust (Score:2)
While there's a possibility that they could develop a more advanced AI system, any AI is going to need a large amount of data to work properly with. We already have privacy breaches of data in North America, can you imagine privacy breaches in a Chinese company? It's not like you can sue Alibaba if something goes wrong.
I've historically ordered cheap stuff like HDMI cables from Chinese companies online to find that they end up in an unmarked / undeclared and untracked envelope. While the price is right (
Business in China (Score:3)
Alibaba is a great company and I do admire Jack Ma, but who in their right mind would invest in China after Xi Jinping went full dictator? Somehow I don't worry about Google and Facebook. Between the dictatorship, massive wealth disparity, and human rights violations I expect the whole system to collapse. Investing in any AI companies in China, or any promising company in China for that matter, I believe would be akin to investing in Russia in 1916.
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Alibaba is a great company and I do admire Jack Ma, but who in their right mind would invest in China after Xi Jinping went full dictator?
You ... thought it wasn't a dictatorship before?
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Well, a capitalist autocracy before. They were going in the right direction until Xi Jinping took power. I guess my point is you could have some confidence in your investments there until recent years; now I wouldn't dare do anything with the country.