Technology
NYT
Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?
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By PAUL MOZUR and JOHN MARKOFFMAY 27, 2017
Sören Schwertfeger at ShanghaiTech University, where a sizable grant has allowed him to set up an
artificial intelligence lab. Credit Tim Franco for The New York Times
HONG KONG — Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in
Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered
and established.
Instead, he went to China.
“You couldn’t have started a lab like mine elsewhere,” Mr. Schwertfeger said.
The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West
invented the software and the chips powering today’s digital age, has become a major player in artificial
intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future. Experts widely believe
China is only a step behind the United States.
China’s ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K.
Dick meets George Orwell. There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the
country’s ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor
the internet.
Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on
research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, startups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China’s A.I. capabilities, according to two
professors who consulted with the government on the plan.
China’s private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government
and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu — often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificialintelligence-related fields, like speech recognition — this year opened a joint company-government
laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots.
China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration
released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have
traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.
“It’s a race in the new generation of computing,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. “The difference is that China seems to think it’s a race and America
doesn’t.”
Photo
Sören Schwertfeger testing his latest space detection and scanning robot. Credit Tim Franco for The New
York Times
For Mr. Schwertfeger, the money mattered. He received a grant six times larger than what he might have
gotten in Europe or America. That enabled him to set up a full artificial intelligence lab, with an assistant, a
technician and a group of Ph.D. students.
“It’s almost impossible for assistant professors to get this much money,” he said. “The research funding is
shrinking in the U.S. and Europe. But it is definitely expanding in China.”
Mr. Schwertfeger’s lab, which is part of ShanghaiTech University, works on ways for machines, without
any aid from humans, to avoid obstacles. Decked out with wheeled robots, drones and sensors, the lab
works on ways for computers to make their own maps and to improve the performance of robots with tasks
like finding objects — specifically, people — during search-and-rescue operations.
Much of China’s artificial intelligence push is similarly peaceful. Still, its prowess and dedication have set
off alarms within the United States’ defense establishment. The Defense Department found that Chinese
money has been pouring into American artificial intelligence companies — some of the same ones it had
been looking to for future weapons systems.
Quantifying China’s spending push is difficult, because authorities there disclose little. But experts say it
looks to be considerable. Numerous provinces and cities are spending billions on developing robotics, and a
part of that funding is likely to go to artificial intelligence research. For example, the relatively unknown
city of Xiangtan, in China’s Hunan province, has pledged $2 billion toward developing robots and artificial
intelligence. Other places have direct incentives for the A.I. industry. In Suzhou, leading artificial
intelligence companies can get about $800,000 in subsidies for setting up shop locally, while Shenzhen, in
southern China, is offering $1 million to support any A.I. project established there.
On a national level, China is working on a system to predict events like terrorist attacks or labor strikes
based on possible precursors like labor strife. A paper funded by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China showed how facial recognition software can be simplified so that it can be more easily integrated
with cameras across the country.
China is preparing a concerted nationwide push, according to the two professors who advised on the effort
but declined to be identified, because the effort has not yet been made public. While the size wasn’t clear,
they said, it would most likely result in billions of dollars in spending.
President Trump’s proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation’s spending
on so-called intelligent systems by 10 percent, to about $175 million. Research and development in other
areas would also be cut, though the proposed budget does call for more spending on defense research and
some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private
American companies like Google and Facebook.
“The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao
Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. “They were
talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being
significantly affected.”
Photo
Journalists watching footage of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match between Lee Se-dol, one of the
greatest modern players of the ancient board game Go, and the Google-developed AlphaGo. Credit Jung
Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
China’s money won’t necessarily translate into dominance. The government’s top-down approach, closedmouth bureaucracy and hoarding of information can hobble research. It threw a tremendous amount of
resources toward curing severe acute respiratory syndrome, the deadly virus known as SARS, when it
swept through the country 15 years ago. Yet the virus was eventually sequenced and tamed by a small
Canadian lab, said Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. Shanghai and a technology writer.
“It wasn’t that anyone was trying to stop the development of a SARS vaccine,” Mr. Shirky said. “It’s the
habit that yes is more risky than no.”
Authorities in China are now bringing top-down attention to fixing the problem of too much top-down
control. While that may not sound promising, Wang Shengjin, a professor of electronic engineering at
China’s Tsinghua University, said he had noticed some improvement, such as professional groups sharing
information, and authorities who are rolling back limits on professors claiming ownership of their
discoveries for commercial purposes.
“The lack of open sources and sharing of information, this has been the reality,” Mr. Wang said. “But it
has started to change.”
At the moment, cooperation and exchanges in artificial intelligence between the United States and China
are largely open, at least from the American side. Chinese and American scholars widely publish their
findings in journals accessible to all, and researchers from China are major players in America’s research
institutions.
Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Didi Chuxing have opened artificial intelligence labs in
America, as have some Chinese start-ups. Over the past six years, Chinese investors helped finance 51
American artificial intelligence companies, contributing to the $700 million raised, according to the recent
Pentagon report.
It’s unclear how long the cooperation will continue. The Pentagon report urged more controls. And while
there are government and private pushes out of China, it is difficult to tell which is which, as Baidu shows.
Baidu is a leader in China’s artificial intelligence efforts. It is working on driverless cars. It has turned an
app that started as a visual dictionary — take a picture of an object, and your cellphone will tell you what it
is — into a site that uses facial recognition to find missing people, a major problem in a country where
child kidnapping has been persistent. In one stunning example, it helped a family find a child kidnapped 27
years earlier. DNA testing confirmed the family connection.
Baidu’s speech-recognition software — which can accomplish the difficult task of hearing tonal differences
in Chinese dialects — is considered top of the class. When Microsoft announced last October that its
speech recognition software had surpassed human-level language recognition, Baidu’s head of research at
the time playfully reminded the American company that his team had accomplished a similar feat a year
earlier.
In an apparent effort to harness Baidu’s breakthroughs, China said this year that it would open a lab that
would cooperate with the company on A.I. research. The facility will be headed by two professors with
long experience working for government programs designed to catch up to and replace foreign technology.
Both professors also worked on a program called the Tsinghua Mobile Robot, according to multiple
academic papers published on the topic. Research behind the robot, which in one award is described as a
“military-use intelligent ground robot,” was sponsored by funding to improve Chinese military capabilities.
Photo
Mr. Schwertfeger and his team working on an automated arm. Credit Tim Franco for The New York Times
Li Wei, a professor involved in the Baidu cooperative effort, spent much of his career at Beihang
University, one of China’s seven schools of national defense.
A company spokeswoman said: “Baidu develops products and services that improve people’s lives.
Through its partnership with the A.I. research community, Baidu aims to make a complicated world
simpler through technology.”
Still, there are advantages in China’s developing cutting-edge A.I. on its own. National efforts are aided by
access to enormous amounts of data held by Chinese companies and universities, the large number of
Chinese engineers being trained on either side of the Pacific and from government backing, said Mr. Wang,
of Tsinghua.
Driving that attention is a breakthrough from an American company largely banned in China: Google. In
March 2016, a Google artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo, beat a South Korean player at the
complicated strategy game Go, which originated in China. This past week, AlphaGo beat the best player in
the world, a Chinese national, at a tournament in Wuzhen, China.
The Google event changed the tenor of government discussions about funding, according to several
Chinese professors.
“After AlphaGo came out and had such a big impact on the industry,” said Zha Hongbin, a professor of
machine learning at Peking University, “the content of government discussions got much wider and more
concrete.” Shortly afterward, the government created a new project on brain-inspired computing, he added.
For all the government support, advances in the field could ultimately backfire, Mr. Shirky said. Artificial
intelligence may help China better censor the internet, a task that often blocks Chinese researchers from
finding vital information. At the same time, better A.I. could make it easier for Chinese readers to translate
articles and other information.
“The fact is,” Mr. Shirky said, “unlike automobile engineering, artificial intelligence will lead to surprises.
That will make the world considerably less predictable, and that’s never been Beijing’s favorite
characteristic.”
WP
China has now eclipsed us in AI research
By Brian Fung October 13, 2016
(iStock)
Humanity may still be years if not decades away from producing sentient artificial intelligence. But with
the rise of machine-learning services in our smartphones and other devices, one type of narrow,
specialized AI has become all the rage. And the research on this branch of AI is only accelerating.
In fact, as more industries and policymakers awaken to the benefits of machine learning, two countries
appear to be pulling away in the research race. The results will probably have significant implications for
the future of AI.
(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)
If you're not familiar with the term, “deep learning” is a subset of the overall branch of AI known as
machine learning — which basically involves the use of computer algorithms to perform pattern
recognition and analysis. It's this type of AI that powers personal digital assistants such as Google Now, for
example.
The chart above was published Wednesday by the Obama administration as part of a new strategic
plan aimed at spurring U.S. development of artificial intelligence. What's striking about it is that
although the United States was an early leader on deep-learning research, China has effectively eclipsed
it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject. The rate of increase is remarkably
steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted.
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The day's top stories on the world of tech.
The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart below narrows the research to include only those
papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the
field.
(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)
Compared with other countries, the United States and China are spending tremendous research attention on
deep learning. But, according to the White House, the United States is not investing nearly enough in basic
research.
“Current levels of R&D spending are half to one-quarter of the level of R&D investment that would
produce the optimal level of economic growth,” a companion report published this week by the Obama
administration finds.
The government is pushing for a major role for itself in AI research, and here's why: Becoming a leader in
artificial-intelligence research and development puts the United States in a better position to establish
global norms on how AI should be used safely. When AI stands to transform virtually everything
including labor, the environment, and the future of warfare and cyberconflict, the United States could be
put at a disadvantage if other countries, such as China, get to dictate terms instead.
Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on
telecommunications, Internet access and the shifting media economy. Before joining
The Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an
associate editor at the Atlantic
NYT
Technology
China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets
Smarter
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By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERGFEB. 3, 2017
The Chinese-designed multicore processor of the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s
fastest supercomputer. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader
Chinese push to begin driving innovation. Credit Li Xiang/Xinhua, via Associated
Press
Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them
his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of
sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to
the battlefield.
Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”
No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an
interview.
Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the
technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.
The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in
the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial
intelligence among Chinese companies.
Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed that the company had created software capable of
matching human skills in understanding speech.
Although they boasted that they had outperformed their United States competitors, a well-known A.I.
researcher who leads a Silicon Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company Baidu gently
taunted Microsoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese language two years
earlier.
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded
on the assumption of its continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third
Offset” strategy provides a formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry
with China and Russia.
Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military advantage based on technological leadership in
nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon
Valley technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining that military
advantage with a significant commitment to artificial intelligence and robotic weapons.
But the global technology balance of power is shifting. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United
States carefully guarded its advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it
jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.
In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and universally available microchip upended the
Pentagon’s ability to control technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and
advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come from consumer electronics
firms. Put simply, the companies that make the fastest computers are the same ones that put things under
our Christmas trees.
As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia, both Chinese companies and the nation’s
government laboratories are making major investments in artificial intelligence.
The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial
intelligence specialist, left the company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee
the company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.
And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial
intelligence research laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.
Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the United States between military strategists and
technologists over whether the Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent
innovation that will soon overtake the United States in the field.
“The Chinese leadership is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next wave
of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies and national security at the
Council on Foreign Relations.
In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise
missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a
missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence
in the Pacific.
Known as the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or L.R.A.S.M., it is described as a “semiautonomous”
weapon. According to the Pentagon, this means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the
missile uses artificial intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.
The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military
strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small
ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.
“They are making their machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the machines a
tremendous boost.”
Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United States in artificial intelligence and robotics
technologies is a matter of intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United States may be too myopic and self-confident to
understand the speed of the Chinese competition.
“There are many occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or being
invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But then U.S. media reports only on the
U.S. version. This leads to a misperception of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”
Photo
Robert O. Work, left, the deputy secretary of defense, with James R. Clapper Jr., the
former director of national intelligence, center, and Marcel Lettre, under secretary
of defense for intelligence, in November. Mr. Work is trying to bring artificial
intelligence to the battlefield. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
A key example of Chinese progress that goes largely unreported in the United States is Iflytek, an artificial
intelligence company that has focused on speech recognition and understanding natural language. The
company has won international competitions both in speech synthesis and in translation between Chineseand English-language texts.
The company, which Chinese technologists said has a close relationship with the government for
development of surveillance technology, said it is working with the Ministry of Science and Technology on
a “Humanoid Answering Robot.”
“Our goal is to send the machine to attend the college entrance examination, and to be admitted by key
national universities in the near future,” said Qingfeng Liu, Iflytek’s chief executive.
The speed of the Chinese technologists, compared to United States and European artificial intelligence
developers, is noteworthy. Last April, Gansha Wu, then the director of Intel’s laboratory in China, left his
post and began assembling a team of researchers from Intel and Google to build a self-driving car
company. Last month, the company, Uisee Technology, met its goal — taking a demonstration to the
International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — after just nine months of work.
“The A.I. technologies, including machine vision, sensor fusion, planning and control, on our car are
completely home-brewed,” Mr. Wu said. “We wrote every line by ourselves.”
Their first vehicle is intended for controlled environments like college and corporate campuses, with the
ultimate goal of designing a shared fleet of autonomous taxis.
The United States’ view of China’s advance may be starting to change. Last October, a White House report
on artificial intelligence included several footnotes suggesting that China is now publishing more research
than scholars here.
Still, some scientists say the quantity of academic papers does not tell us much about innovation. And there
are indications that China has only recently begun to make A.I. a priority in its military systems.
“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the
U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the
Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Chinese researchers who are directly involved in artificial intelligence work in China have a very different
view.
“It is indisputable that Chinese authors are a significant force in A.I., and their position has been increasing
drastically in the past five years,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese-born artificial intelligence researcher who
played a key role in establishing both Microsoft’s and Google’s China-based research laboratories.
Mr. Lee, now a venture capitalist who invests in both China and the United States, acknowledged that the
United States is still the global leader but believes that the gap has drastically narrowed. His firm,
Sinovation Ventures, has recently raised $675 million to invest in A.I. both in the United States and in
China.
“Using a chess analogy,” he said, “we might say that grandmasters are still largely North American, but
Chinese occupy increasingly greater portions of the master-level A.I. scientists.”
What is not in dispute is that the close ties between Silicon Valley and China both in terms of investment
and research, and the open nature of much of the American A.I. research community, has made the most
advanced technology easily available to China.
In addition to setting up research outposts such as Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Laboratory, Chinese citizens,
including government employees, routinely audit Stanford University artificial intelligence courses.
One Stanford professor, Richard Socher, said it was easy to spot the Chinese nationals because after the
first few weeks, his students would often skip class, choosing instead to view videos of the lectures. The
Chinese auditors, on the other hand, would continue to attend, taking their seats at the front of the
classroom.
Artificial intelligence is only one part of the tech frontier where China is advancing rapidly.
Last year, China also brought the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, online,
supplanting another Chinese model that had been the world’s fastest. The new supercomputer is thought to
be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation, a shift from its role as a manufacturing hub
for components and devices designed in the United States and elsewhere.
In a reflection of the desire to become a center of innovation, the processors in the new computer are of a
native Chinese design. The earlier supercomputer, the Tianhe 2, was powered by Intel’s Xeon processors;
after it came online, the United States banned further export of the chips to China, in hopes of limiting the
Chinese push into supercomputing.
The new supercomputer, like similar machines anywhere in the world, has a variety of uses, and does not
by itself represent a direct military challenge. It can be used to model climate change situations, for
instance, or to perform analysis of large data sets.
But similar advances in high-performance computing being made by the Chinese could be used to push
ahead with machine-learning research, which would have military applications, along with more typical
defense functions, such as simulating nuclear weapons tests or breaking the encryption used by adversaries.
Moreover, while there appear to be relatively cozy relationships between the Chinese government and
commercial technology efforts, the same cannot be said about the United States. The Pentagon recently
restarted its beachhead in Silicon Valley, known as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental facility, or
DIUx. It is an attempt to rethink bureaucratic United States government contracting practices in terms of
the faster and more fluid style of Silicon Valley.
The government has not yet undone the damage to its relationship with the Valley brought about by
Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. Many
Silicon Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely with the Pentagon out of fear of
losing access to China’s market.
“There are smaller companies, the companies who sort of decided that they’re going to be in the defense
business, like a Palantir,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert in the future of war at New America, a think tank
in Washington, referring to the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up founded in part by the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel. “But if you’re thinking about the big, iconic tech companies, they can’t become defense contractors
and still expect to get access to the Chinese market.”
Those concerns are real for Silicon Valley.
“No one sort of overtly says that, because the Pentagon can’t say it’s about China, and the tech companies
can’t,” Mr. Singer said. “But it’s there in the background.”