The more I think about it, the more I think AI is basically perfect for china to succeed in. China’s strengths are:
Massive amounts of money
Massive amounts of data
Massive amount of gumption, often put in the form of scaling infrastructure projects quickly
Likely the ability to make & use legible metrics, how else would you work such a giant bureaucracy work as well as theirs?
And its weaknesses are:
A soon to collapse population
Lack of revolutionary thought
And what it wants is:
Massive surveillance
Population thought control
Loyal workers
Stable society
AI uniquely requires its strengths, solves one weakness while conspicuously not requiring the other (though some claim that’s about to change, AI still seems to not require it far more than most other sciences & technologies), and assists in all of its wants.
We should expect China to be bigger in the future wrt AI. Learning chinese seems useful for such a world. Translation tools may at that point be advanced, but even if as good as a skilled interpreter, likely inferior to direct contact.
Good counterpoint to the popular, complacent “China is [and will be?] anyway lagging behind in AI” view.
An additional strength
Patience/long-term foresight/freedom to develop AI w/o the pressure from the 4-year election cycle and to address any moment’s political whims of the electorate with often populist policies
I’m a bit skeptical about the popular “Lack of revolutionary thought” assumption. Reminds me a bit of the “non-democracies cannot really create growth” that was taken as a low of nature by much too many 10-20 years ago before today’s China. Keen to read more on it the Lack of revolutionary thought if somebody shares compelling evidence/resources.
Taking the ‘China good in marginal improvements, less in breakthroughs’ story in some of these sources at face value, the critical question becomes whether leadership in AI hinges more on breakthroughs or on marginal innovations & scaling. I guess both could be argued for, with the latter being more relevant especially if breakthroughs generally diffuse quickly.
I take as the two other principal points from these sources (though also haven’t read all in full detail): (i) some organizational drawbacks hampering China’s innovation sector, esp. what one might call high-quality innovation (ii) that said, innovation strategies have been updated and there seems to be progress observed in China’s innovation output over time.
I’m at least slightly skeptical about is the journals/citations based metrics, as I’m wary of stats being distorted by English language/US citation-circles. Though that’s more of a side point.
In conclusion, I don’t update my estimate much. The picture painted is mixed anyway, with lots of scope for China to become stronger in innovating any time even if it should now indeed have significant gaps still. I would remain totally unsurprised if many leading AI innovations also come out of China in the coming years (or decades, assuming we’ll witness any), though I admit to remain a lay person on the topic—a lay person skeptical about so-called experts’ views in that domain.
Indeed. I also note that if innovation is hampered by institutional support or misallocated funding / support, we should have higher probability on a rapid & surprising improvement. If its hampered by cultural support, we should expect slower improvement.
Thanks for mentioning this. At a cursory glance, it does seem like Japan says China has a significant fraction of the world’s most impressive academic publishers (everyone who claims this is what Japan says neglects to cite the actual report Japan issued). I didn’t predict this was the case, and so now I am looking at this more in depth. Though this may not mean anything, they could be gaming the metrics used there.
Edit: Also, before anyone mentions it, I don’t find claims that their average researcher is underperforming compared to their western counterparts all that convincing, because science is a strongest link sort of game, not a weakest link sort of game. In fact, you may take this as a positive sign for China, because unlike in the US, they care a lot less about their average and potentially a lot more about their higher percentiles.
Also in favor of china: The money they allocate to research is increasing faster than their number of researchers. I put a largish probability based off post-war American science that this results in more groundbreaking science done.
The only problem is getting AIs not to say thought-crime. Seems like all it takes is one hack of OAI + implementation of whats found to solve this though. China is good at hacking, and I doubt the implementation is all that different from typical ML engineering.
The more I think about it, the more I think AI is basically perfect for china to succeed in. China’s strengths are:
Massive amounts of money
Massive amounts of data
Massive amount of gumption, often put in the form of scaling infrastructure projects quickly
Likely the ability to make & use legible metrics, how else would you work such a giant bureaucracy work as well as theirs?
And its weaknesses are:
A soon to collapse population
Lack of revolutionary thought
And what it wants is:
Massive surveillance
Population thought control
Loyal workers
Stable society
AI uniquely requires its strengths, solves one weakness while conspicuously not requiring the other (though some claim that’s about to change, AI still seems to not require it far more than most other sciences & technologies), and assists in all of its wants.
We should expect China to be bigger in the future wrt AI. Learning chinese seems useful for such a world. Translation tools may at that point be advanced, but even if as good as a skilled interpreter, likely inferior to direct contact.
Good counterpoint to the popular, complacent “China is [and will be?] anyway lagging behind in AI” view.
An additional strength
Patience/long-term foresight/freedom to develop AI w/o the pressure from the 4-year election cycle and to address any moment’s political whims of the electorate with often populist policies
I’m a bit skeptical about the popular “Lack of revolutionary thought” assumption. Reminds me a bit of the “non-democracies cannot really create growth” that was taken as a low of nature by much too many 10-20 years ago before today’s China. Keen to read more on it the Lack of revolutionary thought if somebody shares compelling evidence/resources.
Some links I’ve collected, haven’t read any completely except the wikipedia, and about 1/3rd of the text portion of the nber working paper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_China#Innovation
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22854/w22854.pdf
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chinese-innovation-world-beating-but-boring/
https://archive.is/Lj9OS
https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2021/02/01/2006-the-chinese-on-chinese-science-four-books/
Thanks!
Taking the ‘China good in marginal improvements, less in breakthroughs’ story in some of these sources at face value, the critical question becomes whether leadership in AI hinges more on breakthroughs or on marginal innovations & scaling. I guess both could be argued for, with the latter being more relevant especially if breakthroughs generally diffuse quickly.
I take as the two other principal points from these sources (though also haven’t read all in full detail): (i) some organizational drawbacks hampering China’s innovation sector, esp. what one might call high-quality innovation (ii) that said, innovation strategies have been updated and there seems to be progress observed in China’s innovation output over time.
I’m at least slightly skeptical about is the journals/citations based metrics, as I’m wary of stats being distorted by English language/US citation-circles. Though that’s more of a side point.
In conclusion, I don’t update my estimate much. The picture painted is mixed anyway, with lots of scope for China to become stronger in innovating any time even if it should now indeed have significant gaps still. I would remain totally unsurprised if many leading AI innovations also come out of China in the coming years (or decades, assuming we’ll witness any), though I admit to remain a lay person on the topic—a lay person skeptical about so-called experts’ views in that domain.
Indeed. I also note that if innovation is hampered by institutional support or misallocated funding / support, we should have higher probability on a rapid & surprising improvement. If its hampered by cultural support, we should expect slower improvement.
Thanks for mentioning this. At a cursory glance, it does seem like Japan says China has a significant fraction of the world’s most impressive academic publishers (everyone who claims this is what Japan says neglects to cite the actual report Japan issued). I didn’t predict this was the case, and so now I am looking at this more in depth. Though this may not mean anything, they could be gaming the metrics used there.
Edit: Also, before anyone mentions it, I don’t find claims that their average researcher is underperforming compared to their western counterparts all that convincing, because science is a strongest link sort of game, not a weakest link sort of game. In fact, you may take this as a positive sign for China, because unlike in the US, they care a lot less about their average and potentially a lot more about their higher percentiles.
Also in favor of china: The money they allocate to research is increasing faster than their number of researchers. I put a largish probability based off post-war American science that this results in more groundbreaking science done.
Relatedly.
The only problem is getting AIs not to say thought-crime. Seems like all it takes is one hack of OAI + implementation of whats found to solve this though. China is good at hacking, and I doubt the implementation is all that different from typical ML engineering.