China Is to Data What Saudi Arabia Is to Oil, Kaifu Lee Tells AI Forum
DATE: SEP 18 2018/ SOURCE: YICAI
(Yicai Global) Sept. 18 -- Renowned Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee has compared China's advantage in data with Saudi Arabia's in crude oil reserves, saying the Asian country's edge in the field will be the most significant in developing artificial intelligence.
"If data were petroleum in the artificial intelligence era, then China would be Saudi Arabia," the founder and chief executive of Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures told a gathering at the China Development Forum's special AI Revolution session on Sept. 16.
China's advantages also lie in capital and policies, its 'engineer dividend' and world-class entrepreneurs, making it a center of entrepreneurship to rival Silicon Valley, Dr. Lee said. He predicts that in AI technology China will be on an equal footing with the US, the world's current leader, in five years.
"You'll hear at Harvard Business School in future that Chinese innovation equals America's." the machine learning expert said.
The volume of data in China's mobile payment, meal delivery and shared bike sectors is dozens of times that of the US, meaning that when AI proceeds to actual application, China will benefit from its engineers, entrepreneurs and vast domestic market, Lee said. The US has shared almost all of its top AI research with Canada and the UK, but China has the advantages that can enable it to eventually leapfrog them, he added.
But AI is not a zero-sum game; it needs collaboration, Lee stressed.
"China has accomplished wonders to rise up in the past 10 years," he said. "Thanks to its investment opportunities and the emergence of powerful entrepreneurs, China has established many companies which attract ever more clients with the products they innovate.
"Because its economy is growing constantly and so are the numbers of its internet users, this affords an opportunity that allows China to claim one-half of the world's high-tech companies," he added.
Such companies grow so fast because they have formed a business model that suits them after years of effort, rather than because foreign firms find access to China's market difficult, and thus competition is lacking, Lee said.
Government support for high-tech industry must not be overlooked, Lee added. Zhejiang province, for example, will build new highways to help the driverless auto industry, while the Xiongan New Area is also providing facilities for the development of autonomous driving technology, he said.
We are now in that future time period he was talking about!
Since China has grown to become a major economic world power, it may begin to extend its dominance first regionally (this is already happening) and then globally using what military analysts call "fifth generation warfare." This means using data science to leverage economic and political pressure on rivals in order to subdue them. To understand and counter this, we need to be able to access primary sources in the original Chinese, just like China is building teams of experts with professional fluency in various world languages.
A lot of us already have a large enough online social media presence that much of our life can be pieced together just by crawling through public accessible data.
This cannot be undone and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated.
We apologise but you have been denied access to report posts in this thread. This could be due to excessively reporting posts and not understanding our forum rules. For assistance or information, please use the forum help thread to request more information. Jazakallah
