China Is Stealing AI Secrets To Turbocharge Spying, US Says 50
U.S. officials are worried about hacking and insider theft of AI secrets, which China has denied. From a report: On a July day in 2018, Xiaolang Zhang headed to the San Jose, Calif., airport to board a flight to Beijing. He had passed the checkpoint at Terminal B when his journey was abruptly cut short by federal agents. After a tipoff by Apple's security team, the former Apple employee was arrested and charged with stealing trade secrets related to the company's autonomous-driving program. It was a skirmish in a continuing shadow war between the U.S. and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence. The two rivals are seeking any advantage to jump ahead in mastering a technology with the potential to reshape economies, geopolitics and war.
Artificial intelligence has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of critical U.S. technologies to protect, just as China placed it on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to achieve breakthroughs on by 2025. China's AI capabilities are already believed to be formidable, but U.S. intelligence authorities have lately made new warnings beyond the threat of intellectual-property theft. Instead of just stealing trade secrets, the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale that was never before possible. China has been linked to a number of significant thefts of personal data over the years, and artificial intelligence could be used as an "amplifier" to support further hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year.
Artificial intelligence has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of critical U.S. technologies to protect, just as China placed it on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to achieve breakthroughs on by 2025. China's AI capabilities are already believed to be formidable, but U.S. intelligence authorities have lately made new warnings beyond the threat of intellectual-property theft. Instead of just stealing trade secrets, the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale that was never before possible. China has been linked to a number of significant thefts of personal data over the years, and artificial intelligence could be used as an "amplifier" to support further hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year.
nonsense (Score:1, Troll)
This seems like nonsense to me. Honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be afraid of here, that China could/might/maybe act like Google/Facebook or could/might/maybe 'steal' better tools?
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China is the new Soviet Union. All that's missing now is a new McCarthy working up a big yellow peril scare and witch-hunt. They sure are working on it though...
Is China guilty of spying? Of course, and then some. Is it as bad as the US propaganda makes it out to be? Most certainly not.
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the comical bit is that this bs is behind a paywall. the financial times has the gall to make their readers pay for propaganda about the how the us' most precious ai industry is threatened by china, and comes up with a 6 year old news story about industrial espionage that has nothing to do with ai. comedy gold.
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the financial times
sorry, wall street journal.
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China likes building cheap and crappy weapons like pathetic aircraft carriers. They can easily do much better, but wh
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How does theft of intellectual property or collection of data have anything to do with mutually assured destruction? No one wins a nuclear war.
Sure, everyone spies. The AI hype is nonsense.
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Re: nonsense (Score:2)
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This seems like nonsense to me. Honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be afraid of here, that China could/might/maybe act like Google/Facebook or could/might/maybe 'steal' better tools?
Don't overthink it too much.
You're just supposed to be scared of China in general.
Re: nonsense (Score:2)
breaking news.
today the sun did rise at dawn
Stockpiling data on people (Score:1, Funny)
the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale
They don't like competition.
Simple rule - who gets hurt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hacking public infrastructure should be considered an act of war. You can kill people by cutting off heat or water or power. A state hosting hackers doing this should be tracking them down, making examples of them, and making a diplomatic apology to the target state.
State-sponsored corporate espionage on the other hand, unless your own hands are spotless (and they ain't!), is 'just doing business'. You don't like it when you lose, you don't talk about it when you win, it's all stupid and such but in the long run it is simply the way people insist on behaving and it won't change.
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Was this state sponsored? Why would they want Apple's failed self diving car tech? It doesn't work and Apple abandoned it.
Besides, China already has cutting edge self diving tech. They didn't make the same mistake as Tesla - they got lidar costs and size down, rather than trying to do it all with cameras.
Sounds more like one guy trying to make a few bucks, although it's not clear who he could sell it to.
Re: Simple rule - who gets hurt? (Score:2)
Hacking public infrastructure should be considered an act of war.
It should be handled diplomatically first, and proportionately, like literally everything else.
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Neocon fear mongering (Score:5, Insightful)
China does not need to steal anything, they are given all the knowledge through US outsourcing. I work for a large company and work with engineers in China very frequently. They are just like engineers in US, some smart, some not so much, and some smarter than US counterparts. I repeated this many times before - just look at ethnic makeup of engineers in US semiconductor companies. Most of people are of Chinese and Indian origin. These are highly paid people and can easy move if China offers more incentives.
The way to outplay China is to educate more people and to graduate more people in the engineering disciplines. But educating people does create new wars. US is falling behind China in stem https://www.cee.org/newsevents... [cee.org] and https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/... [asiatimes.com] . US is even behind Russia in STEM, which was a surprise to me.
The US government is off the rails, borrowing more and more money to finance new wars, direct and proxy, and abandoning its citizens to poverty and high healthcare costs. I hope some sane person comes to power, but I am not holding my breath.
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Right. They had to use a 6 year old example to show that China is stealing all of our AI secrets. You would think they would have a lot more recent example, if it was such a huge problem.
They would, but all the evidence got stolen.
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The way to outplay China is to educate more people and to graduate more people in the engineering disciplines. But educating people does create new wars. US is falling behind China in stem https://www.cee.org/newsevents... [cee.org] and https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/... [asiatimes.com] . US is even behind Russia in STEM, which was a surprise to me.
The US government is off the rails, borrowing more and more money to finance new wars, direct and proxy, and abandoning its citizens to poverty and high healthcare costs. I hope some sane person comes to power, but I am not holding my breath.
The US is WAY ahead in religion and political indoctrination though, you gotta hand it to them. Also obesity. Go USA!
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Wait, if they're obese, how are they able to wage wars? That don't make sense...Are you sure YOU'RE not an American?
They will use up all the non-obese ones and when they run out they'll start using an army of robots?
I think the USA has less than 1% of its population considered 'fit to serve', so replenishing the ranks of actual soldiers might be a bit awkward in a real war.
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The US is WAY ahead in religion and political indoctrination though, you gotta hand it to them.
No, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the world leaders in that. The US is barely even in running.
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The US is WAY ahead in religion and political indoctrination though, you gotta hand it to them.
No, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the world leaders in that. The US is barely even in running.
Maybe religion but not indoctrination. The USA has Hollywood and all those tv shows and stuff PLUS the Internet with Facebook etc.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have shit.
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Wrong:
https://www.defense.gov/Multim... [defense.gov]
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your graph is 1. a projection from 2019, 2. relative to gdp. actual spending has ofc increased. then again i don't that think that e.g. the tax billions that have gone to private hands to "help" ukraine are in the defense budget, and the post you replied to specifically mentioned proxy wars.
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your graph is 1. a projection from 2019,
Here's a graph out to 2022 (the graph goes further, but 2023 and beyond is projections): https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
2. relative to gdp.
Arguably that is the important number.
actual spending has ofc increased. then again i don't that think that e.g. the tax billions that have gone to private hands to "help" ukraine are in the defense budget, and the post you replied to specifically mentioned proxy wars.
I'll concede that as a fair point.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
US government reckless borrowing https://fiscaldata.treasury.go... [treasury.gov]
In the end it would US citizens who will be shafted, as we hold majority of the debt.
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> abandoning its citizens to poverty and high healthcare costs.
While there's an element of 'vicious circle' to it, this seems to be a social choice by Americans. Not enough people care about the weak social safety net unless and until it affects them personally - until then, they'd rather have more money in their pockets (or at least the dream of it).
That of course, is an opinion of how the nation as a whole looks from the outside. I'm sure there are pockets here and there who would disagree... just no
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To take your post seriously - The link about China and Russia being ahead of the US? That's based on STEM Olympiad results. As in, high school. Sorry, but that doesn't mean much beyond "our kids are more willing to memorize enormous binders of factoids and regurgitate them on demand". That's been going on for literally decades. I'm
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"What do you think happens once the immigration stops?"
And when is THAT likely to happen? Probably not until/unless the US has a civil war, I would say...
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They aren't necessarily trying to start a war right now, but they want to keep the embers burning. If you want to keep military spending up, then you need to justify it by having an enemy; and if you don't have one, then you need to make one. And make sure you have backups. This is why fear mongering happens. Blaming foreign states and actors, justifying policies in the name of national security, is in the typical playbook of all states. And there's also the added benefit of distracting the public from real
How they got him (Score:2)
They knew he had stolen autonomous driving technology from Apple when they checked his USB drive and found it was blank.
Foreign nationals (Score:1)
We don't have to follow the rules (Score:2)
Meaning: We want US corporations to do it (for us) but don't want our economic/ideological enemies doing it.
The "we don't have to follow the rules" thinking doesn't work so well when everyone else is also a power-grabbing narcissist.
There are no AI secrets (Score:1)
The USA needs to stop slagging off China (Score:2)
Best of luck (Score:2)
I don't support "AI secrets", the world is a better off when these things don't exist.
As for AI enabling mass surveillance and control one need only look at companies involved (Google, Meta, Microsoft..) this has been a huge driver in investments from day 1. Everyone should already be worried.
The only silver lining is that some of the technology has the potential to upend the business models of its creators.
Not the only one. (Score:1)