The race for leadership in artificial intelligence

The two companies will cooperate on projects in mobile Internet, AI, big data and telecom services with the aim of developing future products and services using AI. Data is vital to the development of AI and the alliance will help Baidu access China Unicom’s data.
AI is considered to be the 
second stage in the internet age. During the first stage companies rushed to connect computing machines with people, and in this one they will connect machines with each other.
China and the United States are racing for leadership in this important field, with both investing a tremendous amount into AI research. Although the US 
previously led the race it now seems to have been overtaken by China. Earlier this month, the Washington Post published an article saying that China had eclipsed the US in AI research – both in terms of the number of papers published and the quality of the papers, as indicated by citations.
The practical applications of AI are virtually unlimited. It is being used in areas such as 
transport, virtual reality, facial and speech recognition, medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, security systems, and remote sensing. Clearly it will impact every industry including the financial industry and already some institutions are using facial recognition to authorise transactions. 
At the core of AI is what is called “deep learning” or “machine learning” whereby 
computer algorithms go through data to gain pattern recognition and analysis. For these purposes, the more data there is the better, and China has an edge in this area thanks to its massive population and rapidly growing Internet base. Given that US technology giants such as Google and Facebook are not active in the Chinese market, this helps Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.
These companies, along with other Chinese tech-start-ups, are also investing heavily in the US market. Baidu, which was ranked by MIT Technology Review as the second smartest company in the world (after Amazon), is a leader in facial recognition and is applying AI to automobiles, with the aim of mass-producing a driverless car within five years. In 2013 it set up a Silicon Valley lab for its Institute of Deep Learning where it is competing for talent with American giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook. Notably, its AI efforts are headed by Andrew Ng, a former Google executive. 
In Thailand, artificial intelligence is one of the aspects the Thai government is prioritising under its Industry 4.0 policy. Given its importance for the future let’s hope this proceeds quickly.