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.

Comments

Re:No - Much ado about nothing

[_Sharp'r_]

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.