Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more present in the media, as companies in the USA, like Google and Amazon,
or the equivalents in China, Baidu and Alibaba, are putting a lot of resources into advancing AI technology. But governments
get involved more heavily in the AI industry as well in terms of economic, political, regulatory and also ethical aspects.
Countries like Germany, France and the UK each announced plans to invest in AI with amounts between 1 to 3 billion Euros
in the coming years to boost the development.
In order to develop AI products, which can improve many lives by helping doctors to detect and diagnose diseases more accurately, detect financial fraud, help NGO’s in their missions (e.g. facial recognition to find family members in databases) and many others, it is crucial to have data. Finding a balance between the usage of data, in order to develop products many can benefit from, while keeping data safety & privacy in mind, will remain a challenge and continue to be very dependent on the feelings of individuals towards data privacy. Economically speaking, regulating data strongly might be a setback for domestic companies & research in the fast evolving and competitive AI market. If a nation prohibits or makes the process very hard for researchers, startups and companies, to use anonymized data (e.g. medical), they will have very little chance to develop these AI products, unless they get access to data from other sources and institutions located in other nations. However building AI products is still more likey to be fast and successful when data can be accessed and handled with fewer restrictions. Speed is an important factor, as establishing a market early will give competitive advantage in gathering data, leading to even further improvements of the product. An improved product will attract more customers, which through the newly accquired data helps even further improving the product, starting a cycle of product improvement and customer accquisition. Once AI markets start to establish, it is very hard for others to enter them, as they “tend to be monopoly markets”, as Kai Fu Lee puts it. With this set of assumptions and reasoning, nations, which have the technological capacities to develop sophisticated AI products and fewer data restrictions, seem to have a competitive advantage in developing AI products.
There is not unconditional positivity about AI technology, as uprising concerns about data privacy and the resulting EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or skepticism towards autonomous cars after some crash incidents have shown. While China has their own version of GDPR, the China Data Protection Regulations (CDPR), it seems that collecting data is easier than in other countries and China’s State Council announced in its 2030 plan it rolled out, to become one of the world leaders in AI, with the industry being worth around 150 billion US Dollars or even more by then. And things are moving fast! According to a report by CB Insights, China has surpassed the USA in equity funding for AI startups for the first time in 2017. Further, the report mentions the amount of AI-related patent publications (keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning) are dramatically rising in China. Motivation and vision seem clear, so what are the factors for China to become a leader in AI technology?
Read more in Part II, coming soon!