The Marathon: How do AI superpowers emerge?
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Who’s Kai Fu lee and why did he wrote this book?
Dr. KAI-FU LEE is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the president of Sinovation Ventures' Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is a leading venture capital firm focused on developing Chinese high-tech companies. He is the author of seven best-selling books in China and founded Microsoft Research China, which trained AI leaders in China. He is the author of ten U.S. patents and more than one hundred journal and conference papers.
- As a venture-capital investor, he often gives speeches about artificial intelligence to members of the global business and political elite. When I visit kindergartens, a gaggle of five-year-olds grill me about our AI future and ask the same kinds of questions as some of the world's most powerful people.
- Today, AI is at the center of public discourse, and for good reason. AI powers many of our favorite apps and websites, and in the coming years, it will be driving our cars and managing our portfolios.
- During my back-and-forth with those young students, I stumbled on a deeper truth: we're all full of questions without answers, trying to peer into the future with a mixture of childlike wonder and grown-up worries. This book is my attempt to explore the answers to these questions.
- Part of the reason predicting the ending to our AI story is so difficult is because it's also a story about human beings, people with free will that allow them to make their own choices and shape their own destinies.
What is CHINA'S SPUTNIK MOMENT?
China's technology community didn't properly wake up to the revolution until its Sputnik Moment in 2016. Let’s explore Sputnik moment as the author describe it as follows:
- AChinese teenager, Ke Jie, squirmed in his leather chair, puzzling over a problem, and was locked in an all-out struggle against AlphaGo, a powerhouse of artificial intelligence backed by arguably the world's top technology company: Google.
- Ke Jie was playing a game of Go against a Go player on a level that no one had ever seen before.
- Go, a board game based on patient positioning and slow encirclement, was believed to have been invented more than 2,500 years ago and was considered an art form in ancient China.
- AlphaGo, a computer program, defeated the world champion of Go, Ke Jie, in three marathon matches of more than three hours each. Ke tried every strategy but AlphaGo gave him no openings.
According to
Kai Fu lee ‘’
Over the course of three marathon matches of more than three hours each, Ke had
thrown everything he had at the computer program. He tested it with different
approaches: conservative, aggressive, defensive, and unpredictable. Nothing
seemed to work. AlphaGo gave Ke no openings. Instead, it slowly tightened its
vise around him. AlphaGo's victories in the Ke Jie match signaled the triumph
of machine over man and Western technology companies over the rest of the
world. However, in Beijing's Zhongguancun neighborhood, an area often referred to as “the Silicon
Valley of China.” Today, Zhongguancun is the beating heart of China’s
AI movement.AlphaGo's
victories were both a challenge and an inspiration, turning into China's
"Sputnik Moment" for artificial intelligence’’.
How can we learn about AI revolution?
As AI user, you should learn about the
history of AI and deep learning. Let’s explore the AI and deep learning history
in light of the book,
• Deep learning is a history-altering technology that has survived a tumultuous half-century of research.• In the mid-1950s, the pioneers of artificial intelligence set themselves an impossibly lofty but well-defined mission: to recreate human intelligence in a machine.• The field of artificial intelligence had two camps: the “rule-based” approach and the “neural networks” approach.• The rule-based approach attempted to teach computers to think by encoding a series of logical rules,• while the neural networks approach attempted to make the software more applicable to real-world problems.• The two main approaches to AI have been the rule-based and neural networks. The rule-based approach involves interviewing experts in the problems being tackled and coding their wisdom into the program's decision-making. The neural networks approach mimics the brain's underlying architecture, constructing layers of artificial neurons that can receive and transmit information in a structure akin to our networks of biological neurons.• During the 1950s and 1960s, early versions of artificial neural networks yielded promising results, but in 1969, researchers from the rule-based camp pushed back, convincing many in the field that neural networks were unreliable and limited in their use. Over the subsequent decades, neural networks enjoyed brief stints of prominence, followed by near-total abandonment.• In 1988, I used a technique akin to neural networks to create Sphinx, the world's first speaker-independent program for recognizing continuous speech, but it wasn't enough to save neural networks from falling out of favor.• Neural networks require large amounts of computing power and data, which were in short supply at the dawn of the field in the 1950s. Geoffrey Hinton discovered a way to efficiently train new layers in neural networks, multiplying their power to perform tasks such as speech and object recognition.
• The global shift in AI research is the result of two transitions: from the age of discovery to the age of implementation, and from the age of expertise to the age of data.
How do AI superpowers become superpowers?
‘’Creating an AI superpower for the twenty-first century requires four main building blocks: abundant data, tenacious entrepreneurs, well trained AI scientists, and a supportive policy environment. We’ve already seen how China’s gladiatorial startup ecosystem trained a generation of the world’s most street-smart entrepreneurs, and how China’s alternate internet universe created the world’s richest data ecosystem’’.KAI Fu Lee
• China has the advantage in harnessing the
power of AI today, as it has abundant data, hungry entrepreneurs, AI
scientists, and an AI-friendly policy environment.
•China’s "copycat" era has
incubated a generation of nimble, savvy, and nose-to-the-grindstone
entrepreneurs who will help China become the first country to cash in on AI's
age of implementation.
• China’s unique technology ecosystem is
tailor-made for building profitable AI companies.
• China’s mobile payments revolution was
fueled by the rise of online-to-offline (O2O) startups and the rise of WeChat,
a digital Swiss Army knife for modern life
•. Based on the current trends in
technology advancement and adoption, I predict that within fifteen years,
artificial intelligence will technically be able to replace around 40 to 50
percent of jobs in the United States.
•China and the United States have
already jumped out to an enormous lead over all other countries in artificial
intelligence, setting the stage for a new kind of bipolar world order.
• As AI companies in the United States
and China accumulate more data and talent, the virtuous cycle of data-driven
improvements is widening their lead to a point where it will become
insurmountable.
•The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China
Silicon Valley starts-up versus China start-up, what is the lesson?
• Silicon
Valley is characterized by a techno-optimism and a
belief that every person and company can change the world through innovative
thinking. Silicon Valley is a mission- driven
• However, China's
startup culture is more market-driven, with the ultimate
goal being to make money. This approach has deep historical and cultural roots,
with Rote memorization being the core of Chinese education for millennia and
the scarcity mentality of twentieth-century China.
• Chinese tech
entrepreneurs are at most one generation away from grinding poverty and many
are only children.
• The most
important details in this text are that China's economic rise has not alleviated
the scarcity mentality of its citizens, who have seen industries, cities, and
individual fortunes created and lost overnight in a Wild West environment.
• Deng Xiaoping
once said that China needed to "let some people get rich first" to
develop, but this has only heightened fears and concerns that if they don't
move quickly, they will stay poor.
• The
psychological foundations of China's internet ecosystem are a cultural
acceptance of copying, a scarcity mentality, and the willingness to dive into
any promising new industry. Birthplace and heritage are not the sole
determinants of behavior, but personal eccentricities and government regulation
are also important. The
most valuable product to come out of China's copycat era was the entrepreneurs themselves.
Who
is Charles Zhang?
• Charles Zhang, a Chinese physicist with a Ph.D. from MIT, created Sohoo, a Chinese-language search engine and portal website. This imitation was seen as more flattery than threat to the American web juggernaut.
• At the time, Silicon Valley saw the Chinese internet as a novelty, an interesting little experiment in a technologically backward country.
• To those steeped in the innovation mythology of Silicon Valley, the mini-iPhones were the perfect metaphor for Chinese technology during the copycat era: a shiny exterior that had been copied from America but a hollow shell that held nothing innovative or even functional.
Why “FREE IS NOT A
BUSINESS MODEL”?
•Jack Ma launched a five-year guerrilla war against eBay in 2002, turning the foreign company's size against it and punishing the invader for failing to adapt to local conditions.
• He created Taobao, an auction-style platform, to directly compete with eBay's core business. He also created Alipay, a payment tool that would hold money from purchases in escrow until the buyer confirmed the receipt of goods, and Taobao added instant messaging functions to allow buyers and sellers to communicate on the platform in real time.
• These business innovations helped Alibaba become the biggest e-commerce company in the world.
• Taobao's "freemium" revenue model, the practice of keeping basic functions free while charging for premium services, was an ingenious PR move and a savvy business play. eBay responded by lecturing Ma, claiming "free is not a business model," which sealed eBay's fate in China.
• Taobao quickly peeled away users and sellers from the American juggernaut, and eBay CEO Meg Whitman briefly relocated to China to try and salvage the operations there, but Ma smelled blood in the water and wanted total victory.
• eBay fully retreated from the Chinese market within a year.
Silicon Valley in China, What’s the
story?
Dr.Kai Fu lee describes it as follows:
- Silicon Valley giants have failed in China due to their approach to the market. • They don't invest the resources, have the patience, or give their Chinese teams the flexibility needed to compete with China's world-class entrepreneurs.
- They also lose out on top talent, as they fear that they will never be given a chance to climb the hierarchy at the Silicon Valley headquarters, instead bumping up against the ceiling of a "country manager" for China.
- China's tech juggernauts are often left with mild-mannered managers or career salespeople who are more concerned with protecting their salary and stock options than fighting to win the market.
- However, Chinese companies are building better products than American companies, such as Weibo, Didi, and Toutiao, which are now worth more than American companies.
How
does China think?
• That ecosystem was becoming both
independent and self-sustaining. Chinese founders no longer had to tailor their
startup pitches to the tastes of foreign VCs. They could now build Chinese
products to solve Chinese problems.
• It was a sea change that altered the
very texture of the nation's cities and signaled a new era in the development of the Chinese internet.
• It also led to an overnight boom in production
of the natural resource of the AI age.
What
role does data play in the development of AI superpowers?
• China has already vaulted far ahead of
the United States as the world's largest producer of digital data, a gap that
is widening by the day. The country's massive number of internet users, greater
than the United States and all of The nature of China's alternate universe of
apps means that the data collected will also be far more useful in building
AI-driven companies.
• Chinese companies are instead gathering
data from the real world: the what, when, and where of physical purchases,
meals, makeovers, and transportation.As AI begins to "electrify" new industries,
China's embrace of the messy details of the real world will give it an edge on
Silicon Valley.
What
is O2O revolution?
- The explosion of real-world internet services that blossomed across Chinese cities the "O2O Revolution," short for "online-to-offline."
- And for China's new wave of startups, it meant skyrocketing valuations and a ceaseless drive to push into ever more sectors of urban life.
- By late 2017, Meituan Dianping was valued at $30 billion, and Didi Chuxing hit a valuation of $57.6 billion, surpassing that of Uber itself. WeChat Wallet linked up with top O2O startups so that WeChat users could hail a taxi, order a meal, book a hotel, manage a phone bill, and buy a flight to the United States, all without ever leaving the app. (Not coincidentally, most of the startups WeChat picked to feature in its Wallet were also the recipients of Tencent investments.)
How
to catch up with AI superpowers race?
• Building an AI-driven economy requires more than just gladiator entrepreneurs and abundant data.
• ‘‘It also takes an army of trained AI engineers and a government eager to embrace the power of this transformative technology’’. Kai mentioned.
These two factors, expertise and government support, are the final pieces of the AI puzzle. When put in place, they will complete our analysis of the competitive balance between the world's two superpowers in the defining technology of the twenty-first century.
What Are AI waves?
The
complete AI revolution will take a little time and will ultimately wash over us
in a series of four waves: internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and
autonomous AI.
• The first two waves—internet AI and
business AI—are already all around us; reshaping our digital and financial
worlds in ways we can barely register.
• Perception AI is currently digitizing
our physical world, learning to recognize our faces, comprehend our demands,
and "see" the world around us. This wave has the potential to
transform how we see and interact with our surroundings. Blurring the barriers
between the digital and physical worlds.
• Autonomous AI will be the last to
arrive, but it will have the greatest impact on our lives. As self-driving
cars, autonomous drones, and intelligent robots take over manufacturing, they
will change everything from organic farming to highway driving to fast food.
• These four waves all feed off different
kinds of data, and each one presents a unique opportunity for the United States
or China to seize the lead.
• We'll see that China is in a strong
position to lead or co-lead in internet AI and perception AI, and will likely
soon catch up with the United States in autonomous AI. AI-driven services that
are pioneered in the United States and China will then proliferate across
billions of users around the globe, many of them in developing countries.
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