Chinese AI: Year 1 of ChinAI

In a year that featured the rise of the “AI arms race” meme and headlines like “China’s tech giants spending more on AI than Silicon Valley,” few people dug underneath the hood to see what China’s so-called AI giants, such as Tencent, were actually doing regarding AI at the technical level. It divided the 190 major AI companies that make up China’s AI ecosystem into three layers (application, technology, and foundation), but found that China’s four tech giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei) had promoted a top-heavy AI industry with few companies producing the foundational technologies (e.g. deep learning frameworks and chips) that underpin AI development. In addition to AI’s significance for economic growth and military security, the Chinese government sees AI as a tool to improve social governance, which makes public security applications a large driver of China’s AI development.

Source: chinai.substack.com