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China Has Now Eclipsed The US in AI Research (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by msmash on from the race-for-AI dept.

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.

4 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Quantity vs Quality... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
     

    1. Re:Quantity vs Quality... by Calydor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing is that there have been multiple articles on Slashdot over the years showing a systematic pattern of fraud, cheating, plagiarism etc. in Chinese research done to bolster the appearance that China was developing far faster than they actually were. There have also been articles revealing metaphorical circle-jerk problems with paper A citing paper B citing paper C citing paper A, with the researchers all being good friends of each other.

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      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
  2. Quality Quantity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure they can churn out more papers.. but are they making any progress. That remains to be seen.

  3. Re:What are we, stupid?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Worked well for the US indusrial revolution which was built on stolen technology and piracy from Europe as well.