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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.

14 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      ... which is why they're looking at papers that have been cited, rather than just published by peer review.

    2. Re:Quantity vs Quality... by jandersen · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. 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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    4. Re:Quantity vs Quality... by Ferocitus · · Score: 2

      It's the same in my fields (applied maths/fluid dynamics/ship hydrodynamics).
      15 years ago, the standard of papers by Chinese researchers was generally very poor, but now they are
      contributing as much as 1/3 of papers in top quality, peer-reviewed journals.

      China is building about one university per week at present, and most of them have a scientific focus.
      Of course, the standards at those new universities will initially be mediocre - it takes time
      to set up labs and to put lecturers of quality in place.
      Like India, who are also building universities at a dizzying pace, they see STEM as the future, the
      best way out of poverty and for modernising their country.
      OTOH, look at the erosion of science courses in many western countries. It's no surprise that
      China and India are exporting scientists, engineers, programmers and mathematicians to many
      of those countries.

      It wasn't all that long ago that many Chinese universities and scientific establishments were targetted
        and obliterated by the Japanese Imperial Army in a deliberate attempt to keep China from developing.
      Now China can develop and build whatever it needs. They also have the capability to take from other
      countries technologies they lack if they want them. It won't be long until the only secrets that the US
      has are in museums that show jesus riding dinosaurs.

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      USB, USB, USB!
    5. Re:Quantity vs Quality... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 2

      they see STEM as the future, the best way out of poverty and for modernising their country. OTOH, look at the erosion of science courses in many western countries

      Just look at the people studying science at those western universities. These days, a fair number of them are from Asia or the Middle East. And maybe it's a cultural thing, science isn't just unpopular here or perceived as "too hard", it's actually looked down on a little. I can remember when being an engineer in any field got you social status, and putting that title next to your name meant something. These days? Just listen to every single movie dad talking to their disappointing child: "you could have been a doctor or a lawyer".

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  2. SDC by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

    Is China closer to self driving cars than Google is?

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    1. Re: SDC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      In Communist China, car drives you.

  3. 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.

  4. What are we, stupid?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    The solution here should be simple: let them pay for the research and we'll just steal it. :D

    1. 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.

  5. As a reviewer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Citation shenanigans? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    #DeleteChrome
  7. That's preposterous! by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2, Funny

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    Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. :(

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