Tech Update: Who Will Win the AI Race?
One of the scariest and most exciting fields related to technology is AI and the progress that is being made is both impressive and terrifying. In this article I will discuss the recent gains made in AI in regard to strategic dominance.
In March 2016, Alphabet’s DeepMind research group set a milestone in artificial intelligence when its AlphaGo program defeated professional Go player Lee Sedol, then fifth-ranked in the world, at the complex board game Go.
It wasn't too long ago that AlphaGo beat the pro Go player Lee Sedol but two years is like a century when referring to R&D. Things have progressed a long way since then as you can already imagine.
Now China’s Tencent is claiming a milestone of its own in Go—and China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence. Last week, the company’s Fine Art program defeated China’s top professional Ke Jie, despite giving him a significant head start. Ke recently slipped to number two in the world, after holding the top spot for three years.
So lets review this here... Tencent's Fine Art program defeated a pro Go player named Ke Jie? He isn't just a pro player, he is the second best player in the world!
This is really making news not because Tencent beat a professional Go player but rather Fine Art’s victory put the world on notice because this situation illustrates the gulf that has opened between human and machine players of the complex boardgame.
More importantly this situation proves that the gulf—between AI capabilities in the US and China is getting smaller. In a national strategy for AI released last summer, China aimed to reach a drawing level with America by 2020 with plans to actually pull ahead by 2030.
Tencent, whose offerings span from messaging to payments and music, was named to a “national team” for AI by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology in November, alongside four other tech giants. Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, says the company’s Go program shows the US should take China’s technological ambitions seriously. “Fine Art is yet more proof of the stunning progress China has made in AI technology,” he says.
I've missed a lot of opportunities when it comes to making investments. I missed out on Google, Amazon, Netflix a lot of the biggest names and stocks on the market these days. In terms of betting on the future there aren't many applications more promising than that of AI but I'll admit I have moral conflicts about supporting this technology because I also feel it could open the door to pandora's box and a dystopian world that could spell the extinction of the human race. Sorry to be so pessimistic but it is true!
What do you guys think about this new development? Will China be able to reach their goal of drawing with the US in regard to AI technology and pulling ahead by the 2030s?
Thanks for reading @techblogger!
Source:
Tencent Software Beats Go Champ, Showing China's AI Gains - Wired
Image Source:
Wired
Great post and it’s quite amazing to think how far AI has developed and I do believe China will catch up with America in the near future. Thanks for sharing.
I think china will definitely defeat USA before 2030 @techblogger
Haha :D , like what the matrix and terminatoe movies predicted.
To your question, i feel China would be able to reach the said goal, because apart from companies like tencent and baidu reinventing themselves around AI. China seem to be using the same strategies as the US, reports have shown that China has demonstrated willingness to spend direct large sums of money to technology when there are strategic national interests at play.
Only last year, it established its first national deep-learning laboratory under the leadership of Baidu and in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Beihang University. (Beihang University also happens to be a leader in the development of Chinese military aerospace technologies, including autonomous systems and robotics.)
So in all, it looks like they know what they are up for. They hope to meet the target by 2030.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese researchers do beat American researchers in the quest to develop the best AI.
But I think the first AGI that emerges will be SingularityNET. I sincerely hope it is the first AGI anyway.
Have you heard of SingularityNET? This project aims to provide narrow AIs with a way to share information with one another. It has an associated crypto called the AGI token. The reason I hope it’s the first is because anyone can own some of it. If SingularityNET does take off it will mean that the power of AGI belongs to humanity, rather than China, the US, Google, Facebook or Amazon. If you haven’t seen it yet you should definitely check it out.
Putin said that “Whoever becomes the leader in AI sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
In my mind, it's between state sponsored Chinese innovation versus Silicon Valley powered US. My money is on China.
Thanks for the post.
I think China well performed against America I see China become a super power in 2022 😳😳😳😳.
Firstly, fantastic post that focuses on a topic that is, for the majority of people, still quite unheard of, or rather, still considered as pure science fiction.
Like you, I to deeply share some moral concerns surrounding the development and further progression of this technology. As time goes on it will be a lesser case of which country will win the AI race but more so a dialogue surrounding which country will be safest from AI control.
Well actually recently Alpha Go Zero- the new version of Google's Go player- defeated the old version 100 times in a row after only three days of training. The incredible thing is that while the old version was trained with a huge database made up by moves of professional go players, this new version was initialized only with the basic rules of Go, and learned by itself how to win!! We are going super fast folks!!!
Answering your question, yes, I think China will be able to win the race
I have the same opinion.
It's like a race where every country has it's own players.
And the of this race will earn a huuuge price.
I believe that AI is the technology, that will disrupt the whole world, if
it hits a certain limit. The Technological Singularity (Ray Kurzweil)!
I'm very excited and happy to live during this time.
Have an AWESOME day!