Look east
My journey begins at MIT, one of the wellsprings of artificial intelligence. Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known Chinese AI expert and investor and one of the organizers of the Hainan tournament, has come to recruit students for a new AI institute that his company,
, is building in Beijing.
Lee gives a talk entirely in Mandarin to an auditorium packed with about 300 Chinese students. He is dressed impeccably, in an expensive-looking suit and dress shirt, and he speaks in a confident, soothing tone. The talk touches on the interwoven trends that have driven the recent rise in machine intelligence: more powerful computers, ingenious new algorithms, and huge quantities of data. He argues that China is perfectly poised to take advantage of these advances.
“The U.S. and Canada have the best AI researchers in the world, but China has hundreds of people who are good, and way more data,” he tells the audience. “AI is an area where you need to evolve the algorithm and the data together; a large amount of data makes a large amount of difference.”
In 1998 Lee founded Microsoft’s Beijing research lab, which showcased the country’s exciting talent pool (see “
”). Then, in 2005, he became the founding president of Google China. Lee is now famous for mentoring young entrepreneurs, and he has more than 50 million followers on the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo.
In the audience are exactly the type of prized students who would normally flock to Silicon Valley. But many are clearly taken by Lee’s message of opportunities in China. The crowd hangs on his every word, and some people clamor for autographs afterward. “Today the U.S. has a technology leadership,” Lee tells me later. “But China has a tremendous amount of potential.”
To see what this potential looks like up close, I travel to Lee’s new institute, half a world away from MIT, in Beijing’s Haidian district. The streets outside are filled with people on colorful ride-sharing bikes. I pass lots of fashionable-looking young techies as well as people delivering breakfast—ordered via smartphone, no doubt—to busy workers. At the time of my visit, a major AI event is taking place a few hundred miles to the south in Wuzhen, a picturesque town of waterways.
, a program developed by researchers at the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind, is playing the ancient board game Go against several top Chinese players, including the world’s number one, Ke Jie. And it’s soundly beating them.
AlphaGo’s victories in Wuzhen are followed closely in the Chinese capital. As I enter Sinovation’s institute, in fact, I notice a Go board on which engineers are testing out the moves made during some of the matches.
The location of the institute is well chosen. From the office windows, you can see the campuses of both Peking University and Tsinghua University, two of China’s top academic institutions. Sinovation provides machine-learning tools and data sets to train Chinese engineers, and it offers expertise for companies hoping to make use of AI. The institute has about 30 full-time employees so far, but the plan is to employ more than 100 by next year, and to train hundreds of AI experts each year through internships and boot camps. Right now, roughly 80 percent of the institute’s funding and projects are aimed at commercializing AI, while the rest is focused on more far-out technology research and startup incubation.
The goal isn’t to invent the next AlphaGo, though; it’s to upgrade thousands of companies across China using AI. Lee says many Chinese businesses, including the big state-owned enterprises, are technologically backward and ripe for overhaul, but they lack any AI expertise themselves. Needless to say, this presents an enormous opportunity.
AI everywhere
Across the capital, in fact, I notice a remarkable amount of interest in artificial intelligence. In one restaurant, for instance, I find a machine that takes my picture and then supposedly uses AI to determine how healthy I am. This seems completely impossible, but the machine says I’m in great shape before suggesting that I have plenty to eat.
This fascination with the technology is reflected in Beijing’s feverish startup scene, which is already producing some formidable AI companies. One of them is
, which was founded in 2014 and is already among the world’s most valuable AI startups. Launched by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, SenseTime provides computer-vision technology to big Chinese companies, including the state-owned cellular provider China Mobile and the online retail giant JD.com. The company is now studying markets such as automotive systems. This July, SenseTime raised $410 million in funding, giving it a valuation of $1.5 billion. The entrance to SenseTime’s office features several large screens fitted with cameras. One can automatically add augmented-reality effects to a person’s face. Snapchat and Instagram offer similar gimmicks, but this one can also add effects in response to hand and body movements as well as smiles or winks.
, director of SenseTime’s augmented-reality group, previously developed office apps for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. She says she returned to China because the opportunities just seemed much bigger. “We were struggling to get a thousand users; then I talked with my friend who was working at a startup in China, and she said, ‘Oh, a million users is nothing—we get that in several days,’” she recalls.
Earlier this year SenseTime’s engineers developed a novel image-processing technique for automatically removing smog and rain from photographs, and another for tracking full-body motion using a single camera. Last year they were part of a team that won a prestigious international computer-vision award.
, SenseTime’s founder and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is wearing a suede jacket, slacks, and glasses, and he has an intense air about him. He seems fiercely proud of his company’s achievements. Tang explains that the company’s name comes from a phonetic transcription of the name of the Shang dynasty and of its first ruler, Tang. This era, beginning around 1600 bce, was a critical age of development for the country. “China was leading the world then,” Tang says with a smile. “And in the future, we will lead again with technological innovations.”
