[nopinsight]

Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills, a huge population, and the hard working and competitive culture of the populace.

An objective measure is PISA results [1]. When comparing with even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, China has many more top performers in Math, as a proportion of population [2].

(In 2015 only four provinces of China participated, but their combined population was 230 million vs Massachusetts's 6.8 million. The math result of Shanghai (24 million pop.) alone would show an even larger gap.)

Since PISA results are scaled such that OECD country's mean is 500 and standard deviation is 100, China's 531 math score implies country mean at 0.3 SD above PISA mean, and US' math score at 470 implies 0.3 SD below mean. If people capable of doing AI research or proper AI implementation need to have math skills at, say, 2 SD above PISA mean, then there will be a tremendous difference in proportion between two populations with 0.6 SD difference.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the proportion will be about five times as large. But China has more than 4 times the population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable natives could be around 20 times. (Since other provinces may drag down China's mean, it could be a bit less. An opposite influence is increasing wealth and thus more resources devoted to education, both by parents and the state. We'll see soon since China as a whole will participate in PISA 2018.)

Moreover, the Chinese government is pushing AI and programming education into their education system, starting from the primary level [3].

The distinct advantage of the US is that it is the magnet for top talents and ambitious people from all over the world, including the Chinese, so it might continue to lead for a while. However, if the US becomes inhospitable to talents or potential talents, it is clear that China with its quality and quantity of human resources will soon take the lead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

[2] http://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa/country/usa1?lg=en

[3] http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0828/c90000-9261282.html

[nopinsight]

Also, my previous comment in a thread on China's progress in quantum computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15535241

China's advances in AI are impressive as well. A ranking based on publications at top conferences from 2012 to present (2017) has both Beijing and Tsinghua University in the world's top 5.

http://csrankings.org/#/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp

(The starting year in the link needs to be changed to 2012.)

Many of the top researchers in US academia are mainland Chinese. I wonder if they will be enticed back home when the Chinese government has managed to reduce the pollution in their major cities down to healthy levels. It appears that the salary for top people there, especially those with experience at major Western institutions, is comparable to those in the US in nominal terms, and the research funding is easier to get.

[congerous]

This article adds nothing new to the discussion about AI.

* We knew about Tencent's AI Lab (Saying you need your own capabilities is another way of saying: We have NIH and we will waste 3 years building our own framework from the bottom up).

* We knew about China's AI plan, which was announced in July. That was huge news at the time.

* We knew about Baidu, but Baidu is actually slipping. They lost Andrew Ng and Adam Coates, and frankly they have executed poorly on social media and cloud computing compared to Tencent and Ali. It looks like they'll lose their lead in AI.

And the article actually contradicts its own sub-headline: "The West shouldn’t fear China’s artificial-intelligence revolution. It should copy it." The West is leading in AI research, and China is copying the West. So what does it mean that the West should copy China? China is playing catch up in AI just like it has been playing catch up in GDP growth. Catching up always moves faster than blazing a trail. The West is blazing a trail now. They don't have much to learn from players trying to catch up.

[Barrin92]

>so what does it mean that the West should copy China?

I don't think you're addressing OPs point at all. They pointed out that the US currently does have the lead in the field due to its larger prosperity for the most part, but that China is rapidly developing more talent.

What we should copy is thus not the technical status quo, but our attitude towards education and talent acquisition in the relevant fields.Technical advantages are not self-perpetuating. If the West grows complacent and does not develop the talent necessary to advance the research, then that lead will reverse.

[congerous]

No. The US has the lead because its competitive advantage in the world economy is exporting innovation. That's what it's good at. The Chinese economy is outperforming the American one in many ways, but the US enjoys a more open society and economy, which encourage innovation. No one would ever say that the West should be complacent, but people are making a big deal out of the Chinese AI push, exaggerating it in a way, and that aligns with more widespread fear-mongering about China. In reality, corruption, chaos and censorship continue to hold China back more than is being reported.

[Arun2009]

As an Indian, India's performance in the PISA test is simultaneously both humiliating and horrifying. India ended up near the bottom of the test when it first took it. Cause for concern? Sure! What did the government of India do? They pulled out of the test citing that it was "unfair" to the Indian students. Around 70 odd nations apparently didn't have this problem.

I have come to think that the country barely has a government at all. We're somehow coping amidst the chaos.

[sremani]

This is a very cynical view, Indian government (central) is and never will be effective, its the structure of India. People feel well governed at district level/zilla parishads. Given the size of country, there should be more push for decentralization, but every Indian politician and his dog loves centralization.

[senatorobama]

There is no hope for India. In 100 years it will be the same. Best hope is to migrate to Silicon Valley

[dxbydt]

pardon my ignorance, but what is the specific correlation of math skills to dominance in AI ? yes, AI/ML/dnn uses substantial amounts of linear algebra, much the way accountancy uses large amounts of arithmetic. but we don’t see mathematicians racing to be accountants. i have specifically written to several math departments in the US asking if they do any sort of AI/ML related graduate research. Even schools that offer courses like “math of deep learning” are happy to confess that this is just a bait - they are using that course title to hook more students to sign up, but the course content is plain old eigenvalues and matrix decompositions and what used to previously be called “advanced linear algebra”. you aren’t likely to get any AI breakthroughs from math folks - that is simply not the focus of math depts. i have correspondended with several COLT folks who deal with the theoretical end of sgd/neural nets/ statistical learning, and even there the correlation with math is expendable.

now if you are talking statistics, in particular applied statistics, most of those departments are retooling by hiring ml folks from csee departments. but the bread and butter courses required to get a stat phd remain the same as they were a decade ago - 2 core inference courses, 2 core math-stat measure theoretic courses, 2 courses on experimental stats. literally no stat dept mandates an ML course, though a few do allow ml as an elective. now, all of this can and will change over the next few years, but its very early days.

essentially, predicating ai dominance on raw math skills is a mistake. there’s no significant correlation.

[yorwba]

The PISA test (at least when I took it) measures math skills in calculation, i.e. the kind of applied mathematics that academic departments write off as too trivial. Nonetheless, those are the skills that are required for Deep Learning as well as accountancy.

You could make an argument that high performers on the PISA test would find AI and accountancy too boring and would go into pure mathematics instead; but I don't think those proportions would be different between countries, so a higher potential (schoolchildren with good math skills) should still translate into more AI researchers, on average.

[AlexCoventry]

> those are the skills that are required for Deep Learning

Why do you believe that?

[yorwba]

Rereading that, I should have worded it as "those are skills that are required for Deep Learning research". There are of course a bunch of other skills you need to be successful, but you won't get far without being comfortable with linear algebra and calculus.

To answer your question, I believe that because I haven't yet seen a Deep Learning paper which did not couch its results in terms of those, even if it might not have been strictly necessary. If you do not understand the basics of current approaches, you'll have a hard time developing them further.

[nopinsight]

We are not talking about the level of professional mathematicians or ML theory researchers you mentioned [1]. An average person, in the overall population, is unlikely to pass or possess the prerequisites (e.g. two semesters of college calculus) to attend the linear algebra course in the first place [2] [3].

For simple, routine applications, one can call machine learning APIs without deep understanding of the math behind them. In most real world applications, however, input data tend to be messy and there are many complications and constraints to satisfy. For the foreseeable future, applying machine learning in the real world requires input from humans who understand the why's and the how's behind an API.

For more advanced work, reading papers is necessary and most of the recent machine learning papers contain substantial math (from the viewpoint of an average person, not a professional mathematician).

In addition, math skills, at the basic level that PISA measures, are highly correlated with logical thinking, which will be relevant for AI engineering for a long time to come.

[1] There are perhaps fewer than 100,000 professional mathematicians in the US out of over 100 million knowledge workers there. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematici...

[2] https://www.noodle.com/articles/the-problem-with-college-cal...

[3] http://hechingerreport.org/high-failure-rates-spur-universit...

[averagewall]

I'm going to get smashed into the ground for saying this, but a lot of psychology research has found that East Asians have a higher average IQ than caucasians. That's known to be a strong predictor of success at math at school and surely has something to do with ML.

[jorblumesea]

The US will continue to cut funding for research and higher education in general. This will give China the edge in almost every level and attract top researchers back. The US is losing its edge.

[jjoonathan]

I only hope the "Sputnik Moment" comes before we give away control of the next major economic sector that technology creates.

[forapurpose]

> The US will continue to cut funding for research and higher education in general

And for K-12 education, which is necessary for preparing students for higher education. What proportion of Americans go to schools which give them little chance at high-tech jobs?

[_ptgt]

Is there any evidence that higher spending in education actually improves student learning outcomes? I'm pretty sure we spend more per capita on our students than China does atm anyway.

[leggomylibro]

Just wait until they apply that talent to go all Minority Report with social control and their Sesame Credit system. It'll be way easier than with crime; look at the wealth of information on social media, and people want to be listened to.

Chairman Yang? Nah, y'all; it's gonna be Chairman Jinping.

[jostmey]

Even with the hostile environment in the US, I suspect China is far more hostile. I don't see China retaining top talent--these individuals might simply go to Europe, Canada, Japan or elsewhere.

[tellarin]

I've been living here for 5y and I work in a research lab. A lot of talent is deciding to stay here or come back (Chinese that went to study/work abroad). Attracting foreign talent is a little different, but so far the government is not really worried about that.

I can only see the trend speeding up. Especially as/if the environment (air quality, etc.) improves. This now, in my personal view, seems to be the main factor for many people to decide to come or not.