china has made giant strides in developing and commercializing most of the modern technologies and has definitely caught its step with the West in that respect. Its cutting edge technologies in the world of mobile devices has already been known for a while, but it seems that with a heavy support of its government it is aiming to take the lead in another area, the Artificial Intelligence. Chinese technological companies, like "Xiaomi", also known as "the Apple of China", are covering the terrain by already making agreements with worldwide technological giants like "Nokia" that include the cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence.
But recently, these attempts have been given a definitive boost by the Chinese Government.
Will the Chinese become dominant in the sphere of artificial intelligence?
The Chinese State Council has recently come out with a far-reaching technological and economic plan to build the Chinese artificial intelligence industry worth $150 billion, with the goal to become the world leader in the field by the year 2030. While this may come as a surprise to some in the West, analyses by, for example by MIT, have shown that the Chinese ascendancy in the AI field has been going on for a while. "MIT Technology Review" published recently a fact that China has since 2014 published most research papers dealing with deep learning.
In 2016, it published 600 papers on the subject, while the US in the second place published around 450 papers.
Kai Fu-Lee, the founding president of Google China told "Forbes" that China at the moment has 43% of the world's trained AI scientists. With the budget cuts elsewhere for scientific research, there might come a trend when the cream of these scientists, still located in the US and in other Western countries, might start to migrate slowly to China.
All the big Chinese technological companies, like "Baidu", "Didi" and "Tencent" have already set up their own AI research centers. With the announced government investment, that trend is certainly to continue.
Concerns in the West
This trend of the Chinese rapid development and research of AI technology has already raised concerns in the West, particularly the US.
The former Obama administration has come up with a strategic plan for AI research in October 2016, which was partly to be a response to the Chinese AI ascendancy. The key reason for the concern is the possible Chinese military ambitions since artificial intelligence is to play in the future evolution of warfare. Given the fact that there is a possibility that the US science research funding is to be slashed further, these concerns among the researchers, analysts, but also businessmen and entrepreneurs might even grow further. What is certain though is China is well on its way at achieving its artificial intelligence development goals.
