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Is China Outsmarting America in AI? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares an NYTimes article: Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), all with the aim of growing China's A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan. China's private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu -- often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition -- this year opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots. China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.
How much money is Google putting into AI research? Amazon? Apple? IBM? Others? How successful are they compared to the Chinese government's efforts?
How many products or services do people use which rely on U.S. company's AI efforts and how many which rely on Chinese created efforts?
The idea that the only comparison is between Chinese government funding and U.S. government funding is ridiculous. The private companies in the U.S. working on AI are the ones actually accomplishing things nowadays and announcing another government 5-year plan for China to win some sort of AI race isn't going to change that.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
In all fairness, I believe you are conflating AI with AGI.
Artificial intelligence has been dramatically improving at a staggering pace and is focused on singular tasks. Artificial "General" Intelligence is still nowhere to be seen on the current technological horizon, and would allow a computer to be amazing at any number of tasks.
That has not stopped writers, who earned their IT chops in a movie theater, from repeatedly suggesting that any AI that can drive a car or beat a World Master Go player is just steps away from initiating a discussion about its personal dreams and ambitions.
The problem is that you misunderstand what "artificial intelligence" means. John McCarthy, the person who coined the term in 1956, defined it as making machines "behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving." It explicitly does not require machines to be sentient. It does not require the machine to follow the same "thought processes" that a human would when performing that action. When a human plays chess, or translates a document into a different language, or drives a car down a street while obeying traffic laws and not hitting anything, everyone agrees they are displaying intelligence. Therefore when a computer does the same thing, that counts as artificial intelligence. That's been the standard definition of the term for the last 60 years.
If you want a computer to be sentient, that's something completely different. We're nowhere near being able to do that. We aren't even sure how to define what that would mean. But that isn't what the term "artificial intelligence" means.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I'll do that once the EU countries give up their separate UN votes :)