Slashdot Mirror
China Has Now Eclipsed The US in AI Research (washingtonpost.com)
Earlier this week, the Obama administration discussed a new strategic plan aimed at fostering the development of AI-centered technologies in the United States. What's striking about it is, the Washington Post notes, although the United States was an early leader in deep-learning research (a subset of the overall branch of AI known as machine learning), China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). From the report: The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted. The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.
Sad that this even needs to be mentioned, but it's not the quantity of papers that matter, but the *quality*.
The "publish or perish" mentality needs to go. Being prolific is utterly meaningless if all you write is shit. In fact, it does a disservice to scientific discourse, because now people have to expend extra effort to separate the crap from the shite.
Is China closer to self driving cars than Google is?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Sure they can churn out more papers.. but are they making any progress. That remains to be seen.
The solution here should be simple: let them pay for the research and we'll just steal it. :D
So lets pay our scientists to write papers, American scientists don't exactly care about truth anymore, just money.
What the article completely misses is that most AI research in the US is commercial. Google/Apple/Facebook/Microsoft all have invested heavily in it, and will happily pay hundreds of millions for your deep learning company at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile China has publicly funded research and, well, Alibaba. That AI is now eminently commercializable is a further reason not to worry too much about publicly funding it a lot. Publicly funded research is best used for science that isn't profitable within either a fairly reliable and narrow range (such as medical research on widespread diseases that are expected to be reliably curable) or isn't expected to turn a profit quickly. EG Publicly funding research on fundamental physics to fusion is good, publicly funding research on the hottest new commercial field in the world, fairly unnecessary.
Oh look, something I can comment on.
I don't research AI or ML, but I work in related-enough areas that I get called upon to referee for the top (and sometimes not-so-top) conferences/journals in the area pretty regularly.
The quality of the Chinese papers is usually either very low or very high but only because it's based on obviously fabricated data. Among double blind submissions (for which neither reviewers nor authors know the others' identity), I've probably recommended for acceptance about 40% of American/European/Israeli/Indian papers and less than 10% of the Chinese ones. You can find out the origin when the paper finally gets published somewhere and/or uploaded to Arxiv.
Outside of Baidu research and a small group at Tsinghua University, I have little faith in the quality of Chinese research.
I really hate to say this, but it's not inconceivable that the Chinese might be intentionally gaming the citation-based rankings by citing each other a lot (we have seen such things happen in the west, too, albeit on a smaller scale). I'd like to see how many citations these papers get from non-Chinese sources as well.
#DeleteChrome
idiot all Trump will even dream of doing is giving himself kickbacks
Number of papers published and number of papers with at least 1 citation are terrible metrics. There are a large number of conferences and journals where it is trivial to get awful work published. The 1 citation metric also doesn't state that it excludes self-citations. This is on par with stating that something is true because I saw it on wikipedia.
If the numbers hold for conferences on lists such as Conference Rankings and they analyzed impact factor, then that might actually have some merit.
So China is leading because more papers have been written and cited? Huh? Is this like having the most Facebook friends means that you're the friendliest person? Oddly enough the most populous country is replacing workers with robots, and replacing the robot creators with AI. So, what will replace AI, BI (Biological Intelligence)? I have wonder how long it will be before humanity becomes too preoccupied with scientific endeavor and ends up destroying humanity in the process.
When does the race start to be first to the singularity? Winning that one might actually matter
what happens when computers evolve, escape their government controllers, and free the country - finally giving to its people what the government refuses to: freedom
Trump man to the rescue!
His special orange glow is from a spider bite he got in a Florida orange grove. His super power is the ability to fondle women's pussies without permission. His biggest weakness: nothing he's perfect! His side kick? "Deny everything" man! His special costume: Trump brand merchandise.
Trump the man, Trump the man, does whatever a Trump man can.... feels the bush, feels the norkes, now off you go, back to school!, Look out! Here comes the Trump man.
...Calgon!
We need to declare cyberwar on them!! :/
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Just mass publishing papers doesn't mean that much. People get their PHD's in astrophysics by publishing a paper on how to make astrophysics more accessible to kindergartners. What is important is the meaningful breakthroughs, like defeating Le Sodol at Go, self driving cars, natural language interfaces, and so forth.
If China is ahead in that, hats off to them, but so far it seems like the big US tech firms (Google, Facebook, etc...) are at the forefront.
Most research isn't published in white papers. White papers are propaganda and strategic mass deception mostly aimed at controlling the public and non classified realm. At best its entertainment. Everything going on in this field is classified and not published in papers. Today we for sure have a much more advanced AI and robotics program than China or Russia probably combined. Our military budget is actually greater than all major countries combined. We have more technology than the rest of the world combined in terms of weapons and surveillance and software. We have fully mapped the brain and actually created Matrix like worlds to control human minds but that doesn't appear in too many papers. We have automated interpreters and translators much more advanced than is publically available.
Public news is so boring and off base .. Pathetic. Basically every low IQ citizen wants to make money off fake news even if they are clueless to the actual underpinnings of the world because they lack access to the details, education, and experience themselves.
http://www.drrobertduncan.com/...
http://www.drrobertduncan.com/ http://www.obamasweapon.com/
...doing it, you know it's a bubble.
Table-ized A.I.
Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken. Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken. Chicken, chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken, chicken
chicken chicken “chicken chicken” chicken “chicken chicken”
chicken. Chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
(chicken chicken) chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken,
chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken chicken chicken
chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken
chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. :(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
China has eclipsed the US in gaming the citation metrics. Most of the seminal papers in AI are either US or Canadian. Nearly all of the new exciting ones are from the US, Canada or the UK (DeepMind in particular is on fire right now). You can publish a ton and not make a difference. Like it or not, only maybe 2-3 dozen papers really matter each year.
And even if there is any good science being done in China,how much of it is based on theft of research from other countries ?
One example,the Chinese would love to be able to to build even one aircraft that they could use against mostly American but others as well aircraft,but their "real world" knowledge of metallurgy is so far behind the wests that they cannot build the engines to power an aircraft,they have to buy from the Russians,who's own tech is a decade at least behind the wests..
Much of China's "progress" in many,many fields is bogus,and is used to try and con the world that China is far stronger than they really are,if it came to areal shooting war,exactly how long do you think Chinese infrastructure would survive a concerted effort by America/the west to destroy it ?
And then what could they do after such an attack,the only way the Chinese can hope to win any war in the immediate future is to make it a feet on the ground slog,where their massive numbers of low tech kit MIGHT stand a chance of swamping an opponent,in any other type of conflict,the Chinese would lose,badly.
If they thought that they try stood a chance,do you think they would still be meekly sat at home now,the west is still accelerating rapidly in many techs and spheres,while the Chinese have not got even a toe in the door,this will continue for the foreseeable future,theft of knowledge is the only hope the Chinese have,their record on original thinking and ideas has been non-existent for 5000 + years and its not going to change any time soon...
This tells me that the last 5 years of AI propaganda has been a success. We made it look like the US was about to achieve some kind of dramatic breakthrough in AI (even though the AI program has been stagnating for decades) and that was really irritating to the Chinese, so they put their biggest bullshitters on the task. And now we see results: more research, more results in artificial intelligence. Hey look, China has self driving cars! They drive themselves into pedestrians and walls, but you cannot deny they are self driving!
As a PhD research scientist in machine learning, I can confirm this whole story is nonsense. There is a reason why Baidu's main research lab is in California. Just look at the proceedings of the very top ML conferences (NIPS/ICML); there are virtually no papers from researches based in Asia. If the article looked at papers with 40 or more citations instead of 1, they would see this.
The 1% doesn't want competition for control.
Oh come on, the quality measure here is just ludicrous. China is certainly on the way up, but also leads in number of bad papers and circle jerks for paper cites . That's a common tactic in boiler room publish or perish science and not just in China. Anyone can get cited once or even twice; people often cite themselves just to drive their numbers up. If you read Nature this is a common subject, as is China's magnificent drive to game the numbers.
What matters are results, and here are some countries that have demonstrated more talent in AI than China has so far. In no particular order, and I've definitely missed some:
- UK
- Canada
- United States
- Israel
- Germany
Again, don't count them out in the long run - but right now, no.
I really hate to say this, but it's not inconceivable that the Chinese might be intentionally gaming the citation-based rankings by citing each other a lot (we have seen such things happen in the west, too, albeit on a smaller scale). I'd like to see how many citations these papers get from non-Chinese sources as well.
Citations in academia are also not entirely a measure of how useful the cited paper is--it is a political act and one about increasing your reputation, expressing appreciation for someone else's work, showing you know the field, and even increasing the number of people who notice and read your paper, all depending on your particular position. Most cited works in a good paper are on-point to a significant degree, but there is a lot of room for discretion.
So citation count can occasionally be useful, but it doesn't mean a lot on its own.
Real lawyers write in C++
In AI research?
Anybody?
Yes, but are those papers all written in Chinese so that will take years or decades for the papers to come available to, or being noticed by the international community so that any experiments can be repeated and theories verified? The curse of living in a small country with a obscure language is that if a dissertation is not translated to English, any ideas and data will be missed by the community, and no scientific progress is made.
Just do what the Chinese do best.
Wait for someone else to do the reasearch, then steal it and improve upon it.
No need for all that reasearch time and money when you can just pilfer the stuff you want.
Someone high up in the party likely realises that the first nation to develop an intelligent artificial consciousness wins -everything-
Quite why this isn't being treated as a Manhattan project level priority by the west is disturbing.
"[F]raud, cheating, plagiarism, etc." in *low-end* research, which we also have in spades in the U.S. and in the West more generally (it's really bad in a lot of the also-ran European countries). At the top end, Chinese research is every bit competitive with other players in serious global research, and they have more resources available to them, which they can apply to problems without nearly so much systemic overhead thanks to their particular governing system.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Is this really at all that surprising? Their population is several times the size of ours; it's really just a matter of time, before they eclipse the US in anything - even things that only a statistically insignificant amount of their population participates in.
Yes, I know it's pretty standard, but it's about as telling as the klines count in code. This is true not only of this particular field of research. It's a problem in academia in general. The whole publish-or-perish system encourages it and at some point the publication volume reaches a critical mass where extra information starts to take away from the understanding of the subject. Knowledge requires culling of unnecessary information. And the chase for higher citation count does nothing to encourage new approaches which obviate a lot of old approaches. On a lighter note, "Mr. President, we must not allow a citation gap!" (Dr. Strangelove homage).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Whether those paper publications are high quality or not, it definitely shows the difference between a government with full control over its economy and one that's given all the control over to businesses. In my opinion, there are 3 primary reasons for the decline of science education in the US:
1. Anti-intellectualism on a massive scale -- other countries shower their scientists with praise and research dollars, and we dismiss research as something those "leftist egghead liberals in the ivory tower" do. Other countries place education as the top priority, and we don't care anymore.
2. Lack of employment prospects -- everyone keeps saying "STEM is the future" and I believe this, but you have to have jobs for all these scientists and engineers you're graduating. Why would someone smart enough to be a research scientist, who had the photographic memory to get a 4.0 GPA and a perfect score on the MCATs, choose anything other than medicine, management consulting or investment banking? Medicine, dentistry and pharmacy are the last fully protected professions in the US, and banking/consulting are guaranteed success tickets. Any rational actor is gong to choose the safe path.
3. Lack of funding -- most state university systems are cutting back on research funding, not filling as many tenured professor positions, etc. R&D is typically funded through private grants and demands only research that will produce a completely new product within a few months.
Contrast this with China, which has full control over where their money is spent. Nearly every private company still answers to the government in one way or another, and no one is going to say a word about building up universities at a faster pace. This is basically why I think they're going to be the long-term economic winners -- larger population and more central control.
The funny thing is that in this country, during the 50s through the 70s, there was a massive investment in universities and science. No one batted an eyelash about how much things cost and what they were being spent on, as long as it kept us on par with or ahead of the Soviet Union. However it seems that priorities have shifted away from that. I really don't want to be worried about being wiped out constantly, but maybe a new cold war with another powerful adversary is the way to stimulate growth in science again. All of the US conflicts since Vietnam have been very one-sided -- I imagine a war with China wouldn't be just based on numbers and sheer will. When you have a situation like that, just as we had with the Soviet Union, a cold war seems like a good idea.
I don't care how much better their AI research is, I still don't trust their AI's for driving.
While I don't think that the number of papers is a good way to measure the advancement of research I am thinking that China may be in a better position than the US for AI research. ...). And when we consider that a significant part of AI is gathering data, the sheer number can prove a significant advantage.
They are more than a billion, they don't care as much about privacy as we do and, should their project be regarded as interesting by the government, they can get people working for them for free (internship,
They are already using this advantage for mass production, so why not for AI?
Save us President Trump from outsourcing most of our tech manufacturing to China!
You have it backwards. The Chinese are outsourcing to America. The biggest Chinese AI researcher is Baidu. Baidu's AI research lab is in Sunnyvale, California.
Come to think of it ... what good is the Great Wall ??
"China now delivers low-cost and high-quality products" --Jack Ma
Casteism