China vs. USA – The Battle for the AI Empire (or is it time to roll up our sleeves?)
Is China or the USA better in AI? We wrote a similar article about two years ago, where we discussed the book AI Superpowers by IT guru…
Is China or the USA better in AI?
We wrote a similar article about two years ago, where we discussed the book AI Superpowers by IT guru Kai-Fu Lee. At that time, we knew that Beijing had allocated two billion dollars for the development of an industrial park focused on artificial intelligence.
Two years later – on 1st June, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) introduced Wu Dao 2.0 (which means enlightenment). Wu Dao 2.0 is now the largest neural network ever created and probably the most powerful as well. It was trained on 4.9 TB of high-quality text and image data, which is quite a lot compared to the training dataset of GPT-3 (570 GB after cleaning). It is reported that the Wu dataset consists of 1.2 TB of Chinese text data and the same in English, plus 2.5 TB of Chinese graphic data. In comparison, I feel like the Czech king of AI when I train networks on a few dozen GB of Czech texts. I should rather feel like a rabbit. My first tentative steps in teaching AI in Czech secondary schools cannot be compared to how China introduced AI into school curricula in 2018 and piloted the project in 40 schools.
China surpassed the USA in terms of the number of AI research papers published in 2020. The same report states that the work of American scientists was more frequently accepted at prestigious conferences and was cited more often by other researchers worldwide. In an update for 2021, I found that China now also leads in journal citations, but the USA still dominates in contributions to AI conferences.
There’s probably no point in discussing who has more data and fewer ethical barriers to work with it freely (China).
And what about finances? I thought that after the mega-amazing investments from the Chinese government, China would have the upper hand over the USA. However, it seems that in total, the USA has the largest investment market in the world in the form of private companies engaged in artificial intelligence.
And the conclusion? I still see both the USA and China as two AI superpowers that are rapidly advancing. Here in the Czech Republic and in the EU, we write about how amazing we are in ethics and have skilled people, but it is clear that we are increasingly lagging behind. When a leading expert in the Czech Republic and the EU applies for a grant for a Czech model, they can afford to request 3 million CZK and have about a 10% chance of being selected, with 30% of the funds needing to be paid from their own pocket. When their counterpart in Beijing applies for the same, they can ask for billions, have exponentially more data, and face fewer regulations.
I believe that to succeed, we must unite and support each other in our Czech pond. We have enormous potential in smart people who can think outside the box. What if we taught our universities to monitor what is happening in the world more closely and connect them more with business? We have so many projects in companies that we can't keep up, and students are doing boring work for the drawer? Let’s teach our businesses and politicians what AI can do, and it will all accelerate even further. Enough pondering, it’s time to roll up our sleeves!
Sources:
• https://analyticsindiamag.com/china-vs-us-battle-lines…/
• https://blog.alphai.cz/bude-cina-za-par-let-lidrem-v-ai/
• https://towardsdatascience.com/gpt-3-scared-you-meet-wu…
• https://ceskapozice.lidovky.cz/…/v-umele-inteligenci…
• https://blog.alphai.cz/umela-inteligence-je-v-cine…/
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