China challenges the US for artificial intelligence dominance

Artificial intelligence has had more than its fair share of ups and downs over the past 60 years, but one constant feature of the field has been the dominance of the US. Significant contributions to AI have certainly arisen elsewhere but, until recently, every AI system that made worldwide news originated in the US.

DeepBlue, which defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, was an IBM system, as was Watson, which defeated champion Jeopardy players in 2011. The robot Stanley, which demonstrated the feasibility of driverless cars in 2005, was developed at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. And if you dig a little deeper, the reasons for the dominance of the US become clear: Darpa, the US military research funding agency, is acknowledged in many of the key research papers in the AI canon.

But today American hegemony in AI is being seriously challenged for the first time. One of the most remarkable features of the current AI boom is the sudden and very visible presence of China as a global force.

One crude but nevertheless useful way of measuring national scientific muscle is to look at how a country performs in the leading scientific publication venues. Historically, one of the key scientific conferences in AI is the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of AI. This was first held in 1980 and, within a few years, the conference was receiving some 5,000 delegates. The 1980 conference was dominated by the US: there was not a single paper written by researchers from a Chinese institute, and only a modest European presence.

This is not too surprising, of course: in its early days the conference was a US-centric event, and China was a very different place back then.

Go forward 18 years to the 1998 conference, and America still dominated, but with a substantial non-US presence, particularly from Europe. But there was just one paper from China — more specifically from Hong Kong, which had reverted to Chinese rule just one year before.

Today, the picture is startlingly different. At the 2018 conference, held in New Orleans in February, China submitted 25 per cent more papers than the US (1,242 to 934). More tellingly, it was just three papers behind the US in acceptances.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that China is now in serious competition with the US for dominance in AI. No European nation remotely competes at these volumes and, even taken as a whole, Europe is not really in competition for gold or silver.

So why is China suddenly so prominent? In a word: scale. The machine-learning techniques behind the current AI boom are seriously data hungry. To recognise human faces, translate languages and pilot driverless cars requires huge quantities of “training data” — the fuel for machine learning algorithms that we generate every time we go online or use our smartphones.

With a population in a single market larger than the US and Europe combined, Chinese companies have a natural advantage in terms of access to data. While they might not be familiar to ordinary consumers in the west, Chinese tech companies like Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and JD.com are global giants in terms of the number of users and market capitalisation. And they are all investing in AI on a dizzying scale. Ask a British teenager if they know WeChat, Tencent’s social media app, and you will be met by blank looks (I know because I’ve tried); but in China, the app has nearly a billion users.

One face of China’s AI revolution is Andrew Ng. British born to parents from Hong Kong, Mr Ng was director of the AI lab at Stanford, one of the great historical centres for US AI research. He made his name developing AI software to control helicopters, and won the Computers and Thought Award, the key research award for young AI scientists.

He went on to work for Google, starting the Google brain project, and then became chief scientist for Baidu. Last year, he left Baidu to pursue other ventures. Brilliant, charismatic, and above all, remarkably energetic, Mr Ng has a flair for highly quotable soundbites. He recently tweeted: “Pretty much anything that a normal person can do in less than a second, we can now automate with AI.” I am not inclined to argue.

In 2017, he declared that AI is the “new electricity”, and that “just as electricity transformed many industries roughly 100 years ago, AI will also now change nearly every major industry”. If that is the case, it is very likely that China will be the generator that powers AI in the decades ahead.

The writer is professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and author of ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Ladybird Expert Book’