Recently, Goldman Sachs released a research report titled “China’s Rise in ARTIFICIAL Intelligence.” In the report, Goldman sachs believes that China has become a major competitor in THE FIELD of AI, and that the Chinese government’s goal of building an “intelligent economy” and “smart society” will likely drive China’s future GDP growth.
The report shows that China’s AI development has advantages in four aspects: human resources, data, infrastructure and computing capacity, and has the strength to fully develop AI in human resources, data and infrastructure. In March this year, AI appeared in the government work report, and In July, China announced its first AI development plan at the national strategic level, which made the world full of confidence in China’s AI development.
In the field of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, the United States is five years ahead of China. The United States started its development in 1991, while China only had its AI companies in 1996. However, thanks to a large number of Internet companies like BAT, China is developing rapidly in the field of AI.
1. China’s AI venture capital is catching up
According to the data in the 2017 Sino-US Research Report on the Status and Trends of AI Venture Investment released by Tencent, the cumulative venture investment in THE AI field in the United States is 97.8 billion yuan, and that in China is 63.5 billion yuan. Although there is a gap in the total amount, there are 22 large investments of more than 100 million dollars in China, totaling 35.35 billion yuan. There were 11 large investments of more than $100 million in the United States, totaling 41.73 billion yuan.
In the first three months of 2017, 36 domestic AI companies received investment, more than half of which received more than 10 million yuan in financing. Several companies, including Shenxing Technology, Zomu Technology and Zhongyetong, received more than 100 million yuan in financing. China’s investment in AI continues to grow.
2. The gap between the number of Chinese AI companies has narrowed
By June 2017, there were 2,542 AI companies in the world, 1,078 in the United States and 592 in China. However, American AI companies started to be created in 1991 and reached a peak in 2013, while Chinese AI companies started to be created in 1996 and reached a peak in 2015.
The starting stage was five years earlier than China, the development stage was six years earlier than China, and the outbreak stage and peace pause period were only two years earlier than China. In terms of the number of enterprises, China has caught up with the time gap of 3-4 years of the United States, but China’s development momentum is still higher than the United States.
Third, Chinese AI companies pay more attention to the application layer
The US has the largest number of AI startups in natural language processing, machine learning applications and computer vision and imaging, while China has the largest number of AI startups in computer vision and imaging, intelligent robotics and natural language processing. The difference between the two is mainly in two aspects: machine learning and intelligent robot. Machine learning is an auxiliary tool for enterprises or individuals, which is involved in all industries, while intelligent robot is more focused on robots in medical, home and other professional fields, which has a higher correlation with practical applications.
Chinese AI companies focus more on the application layer, while the US focuses more on the basic layer. The United States has 33 start-ups in the fields of processors and chips, while China has only 14, which is also pointed out in the report issued by Goldman Sachs. The only weakness in China’s AI field is in the field of chips.
Fourth, China’s AI industry has a natural advantage in data
Data is the biggest advantage for the development of China’s AI industry. With 1.4 billion people, China generates about 13 percent of the world’s digital information every year. Major AI start-ups rely on massive data for more accurate analysis. Didi Chuxing, for example, processes more than 4,500 terabytes of data per day on average, receives more than 20 billion route requests and processes more than 20 million orders. It will help Didi’s RESEARCH and development activities in deep learning, human-computer interaction, machine vision and intelligent driving technology.
Fifth, Chinese technology enterprises push the development of AI industry
According to statistics, 43% of the top AI papers published worldwide in 2015 had one or more Chinese researchers among their authors. By October 2016, China had more than 16,000 patents in the FIELD of AI.
When it comes to AI, Baidu spends 14.4 percent of its revenue on R&D, close to Google’s 15.5 percent and Microsoft’s 14.5 percent. In terms of r&d personnel, Tencent (51%), Alibaba (45%) and Baidu (43%) all beat Google (38%) and Microsoft (32%).
When it comes to recruiting senior talent, Baidu offers machine learning scientists a base annual salary of $126,000, plus annual dividends and equity, to $220,000 a year, trailing only Facebook at $273,000 and Microsoft at $244,000.
6. Chinese technology companies are shifting their focus to AI
Baidu has set up three LABS around the world, employing more than 2,000 AI r&d engineers, and opened DuerOS, an AI dialogue platform, and Apollo, an autonomous driving project.
In China, Aliyun stands out, with a market share of 40.7 percent. It had 1 million paying users as of June, covering media, Internet, finance, government and other sectors. It is used by one-third of the Top 500 companies and two-thirds of unicorns.
Alibaba Cloud’s Flying Apsara processing system can process hundreds of thousands of parallel transactions per second, and in 2016’s Singles Day, 175,000 transactions and 120,000 payments were processed per second.
In addition, Goldman Sachs is very optimistic about Alibaba’s Ant Financial, which covers 3.2 billion people around the world and has payment data covering 717 million consumers. Goldman sachs proposes that if Alibaba continues to improve the algorithm, the ratio of Alibaba’s China retail revenue divided by China’s retail GMV can reach 5%.
Tencent followed with an ARTIFICIAL intelligence lab in 2016 and a Seattle AI lab in 2017 to conduct research in four areas: computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning. In August 2017, Tencent formed an alliance with experts from several fields to support research into autonomous driving and the manufacture of future related products.
7. China’s AI industry is the trend of The Times
China’s AI industry has become the biggest outlet in the future. AI enterprises focusing on the application layer will change people’s way of life and production through a virtuous cycle and bring convenience to life.
At the 2017 TOP100 Global Software Case Study Summit, Zheng Yu, chief researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, who focuses on “urban computing”, served as co-chair and gave more advice to Chinese AI companies.
The 6th TOP100 Global Software Case Study Summit will be held at The National Convention Center in Beijing from November 9 to 12. It will select 100 of the most representative software development cases of the year, interpret their solutions and the technical logic behind them, and help r&d teams improve their performance quickly.
For more information and schedule of TOP100 cases, please visit our official website. 100 r&d cases worth learning in 2017 will be shared in 4 days. A total of 10 free one-day tickets for the opening ceremony are available on the TOP100summit website on a first-come-first-served basis. Free ticket application: www.top100summit.com/?qd=juejin