Two major events happened in AI in 2016: first, Google’s AlphaGo became the first computer program to beat a 9-dan Go professional, Lee Sedol, without handicaps; second, Obama’s administration released a strategy on future directions and considerations for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. In China, these two events created a “Sputnik moment” which helped convince the Chinese government to prioritize and dramatically increase funding for artificial intelligence.
In response, in 2017 the Communist Party of China set 2030 as the deadline for an ambitious AI goal: it called for China to reach the top tier of AI economies by 2020, achieve major new breakthroughs by 2025, and become the global leader in AI by 2030. The strategy became known as the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and it has spurred many policies and billions of dollars of investment in research and development from ministries, provincial governments, and private companies.
As a result of this concerted effort by China, the American advantage in AI has been disappearing quickly: in 2017 the United States had an 11x lead over China; by 2019 the United States was down to a 7x lead; in 2020 the United States is left with a 6x lead. Furthermore, this analysis by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence found that China steadily increased its share of authorship of the top 10% most-cited papers.
The American advantage is questionable when it comes to the availability of training data. Access to data is part of the broader privacy vs. public good debate, where the United States tends to choose the former, and China — the latter. In China today AI scans faces from hundreds of millions of street cameras, reads billions of WeChat messages, and analyzes millions of health records — all following the data-as-a-public-good argument. This training data availability, combined with China’s 1.4B population, creates an enormous strategic advantage for China.
In response, in 2017 the Communist Party of China set 2030 as the deadline for an ambitious AI goal: it called for China to reach the top tier of AI economies by 2020, achieve major new breakthroughs by 2025, and become the global leader in AI by 2030. The strategy became known as the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, and it has spurred many policies and billions of dollars of investment in research and development from ministries, provincial governments, and private companies.
As a result of this concerted effort by China, the American advantage in AI has been disappearing quickly: in 2017 the United States had an 11x lead over China; by 2019 the United States was down to a 7x lead; in 2020 the United States is left with a 6x lead. Furthermore, this analysis by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence found that China steadily increased its share of authorship of the top 10% most-cited papers.
The American advantage is questionable when it comes to the availability of training data. Access to data is part of the broader privacy vs. public good debate, where the United States tends to choose the former, and China — the latter. In China today AI scans faces from hundreds of millions of street cameras, reads billions of WeChat messages, and analyzes millions of health records — all following the data-as-a-public-good argument. This training data availability, combined with China’s 1.4B population, creates an enormous strategic advantage for China.
