[LostInTheWoods2]

The plan calls for homegrown AI to match that developed in the West within three years, for China’s researchers to be making “major breakthroughs” by 2025, and for Chinese AI to be the envy of the world by 2030.

Really? Major breakthroughs can be mandated by a centralized government? Back in the 80s-90s, Americans were convinced that Japan was going to eat its lunch. It gives me some hope in knowing that we still suffer from this complex.

[TeMPOraL]

US government basically mandated the Moon landings, and they happened within 12 years from Sputnik. So I'd say yes, sometimes a government can just mandate progress.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Dont DARPA and other US gov research groups have a pretty long track record of successful projects?

Computers, nukes, ICs, space, internet, self-driving cars, etc.

They seem to be some of the most well used research money -- precisely the government mandating progress.

[gph]

True, but a lot of those were more specific in their end goals. What exactly is China going for here? Sounds like just general AI research and advancement. That's not a bad thing, but I think it'll probably end up more like the Human Genome Project. We'll get some great fundamental science and advancement out of it, but it's probably going to lead to more open-ended questions instead of the world-changing end results that get hyped at the beginning.

[forapurpose]

> Dont DARPA and other US gov research groups have a pretty long track record of successful projects?

And many failures too. You can't just buy whatever innovation you want with money; if that were true we wouldn't still have energy problems and powerlines for distributing it.

[TeMPOraL]

If you don't allow for failures, you won't get successes either. That's the problem of today - research is increasingly being done in market-driven style, which strongly favors short-term work that the sales department can turn into perceived miracle over long-term, uncertain but possibly high-impact projects.

[evilduck]

The US Gov also poured an absolutely ridiculous amount of money into the space race, peaking around 4.5% of the federal budget for a couple years.

[TeMPOraL]

Which had one of the best ROIs of the things US spent money on. Space access and space-related tech is responsible for so many advances we enjoy today that's hard to even try and list them (some of them you can read about here, though: http://wtfnasa.com). So you kind of prove my point - that a government can literally mandate progress if they back it up with funding :).

[evilduck]

I wasn’t trying to refute you, just pointing out that it was a huge cost.

I’m skeptical that’s our current political climate in the US would be willing to do something like that again unless there becomes an “AI race" (which isn't far fetched, but not guaranteed either).

[graeme]

Japan has a significantly smaller population than China (and the US). I’m not sure how this eluded commentators in the 80s, but it seems a major difference this time around.

[randcraw]

It's not a difference in terms of using AI for automation, however. All the recent advances in AI are strictly on highly specialized tasks, have had (and probably will have) little impact on subsuming general task execution. Thus it's unlikely to replace an entire human worker foreseeably soon.

Based on their keen interest in AI, the Chinese gov't presumably doesn't yet appreciate that success in task-specific AI does not assure the advent of AGI any time soon. I suspect like the Japanese's 5th gen AI initiative, China's quest to give life to terra cotta warriors also will end in disappointment, before the passage of several 5-year plans, anyway.