China pours billions of dollars into AI

China’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence is starting to raise some alarms in the US, but entrepreneurs and researchers are being drawn in nonetheless. This topic was recently explored in a New York Times article that wondered in the headline, “Is China Outsmarting America in AI?” At first glance, the US still seems to be far ahead in research, but China is spending billions of dollars to attract AI talent.

As the Times explains, Suzhou is offering up to $800,000 to leading AI companies to set up operations in the city. Shenzhen, considered the hardware capital of the world, is presenting up to $1 million for AI projects. Smaller, lesser-known cities are getting in on the action, too. Xiangtan in Hunan province has pledged a total of $2 billion to projects on robots and AI.

As a piece of anecdotal evidence, the Times talked to Sören Schwertfeger who did his postdoctorate on autonomous robots in Germany before moving to China and starting a lab that is now part of ShanghaiTech University. His funding is six times larger than what he could get anywhere else, he told the Times. His lab now works on space scanning and obstacle avoidance in robots.

China has other bright spots in AI beyond just pouring money into the market. Baidu is still considered one of the leading AI companies in the world, in spite of some recent financial woes. The company is best known for its speech recognition. However, it was Baidu’s former China competitor Google that stole headlines recently when its AlphaGo AI beat the top Go player in the world in three consecutive matches in Wuzhen.

What is really worrying the US military community is the fact that China is investing in US robotics companies, of which some were considered for future weapons development. Military applications are also a reason for the venture in China, but it takes more than money to create a dominant industry.

Technology writer Clay Shirky noted to the Times that in spite of all the money China spent fighting SARS during the outbreak in 2002, it was a small Canadian lab that sequenced the virus. There is still a lot of great AI R&D happening around the world, especially in countries such as the US, Germany and Japan. It seems little can be done to change the fact thatrobots get made in China, but the development of those robots and what goes on inside is still very much a global enterprise.