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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.
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.
... which is why they're looking at papers that have been cited, rather than just published by peer review.
This is a very valid point, but fortunately the OP has some mention of this:
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.
Let us not blind ourseves with the prejudice, that because the researchers are Chinese, it must somehow be of a poorer quality. China is simply investing much more aggressively in education than the US, so it is no surprise they are able to produce more, good research. That said, I think it is more relevant to look at this per capita; there are 300 million Americans and 1300 million Chinese, which is ~4 times as many, so until they produce >4 times as much good quality research, they are still catching up. They will get there, without a doubt, but I think there is some way to go still.