Strategic implications of Chinese/US AI development

Hendrik_2000

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Via Taishang
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Half of world's top AI unicorns come from China
CGTN
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Six of the 11 artificial intelligence (AI) startups that are considered to be unicorns – which means to have a value of one billion U.S. dollars or above – come from China, according to CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital and startups.

SenseTime took the top spot with a valuation of 4.5 billion U.S. dollars, followed by Yitu Technology at 2.3 billion U.S. dollars and smaller unicorns 4Paradigm, Horizon Robotics and Momenta.

The annual report published by CB Insights compiles a list of 100 of the most promising private companies. The selection is based on several factors, including patent activity, investor profile and market potential. From emerging startups to established unicorns, the cohort is a mix of startups in different stages of funding and product commercialization.

Twenty-three startups on the list are headquartered outside the U.S., including six each from China, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

China accounted for 17 of the top 20 academic institutions involved in patenting AI and was particularly strong in the fast-growing area of “deep learning” – a machine-learning technique that includes speech recognition systems.

The country unveiled a
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in July 2017, aiming to build an AI technologically world-leading domestic industry by 2030. The value of China's core AI industries is expected to exceed 150 billion yuan (22.15 billion US dollars) by 2020 and 400 billion yuan (59.07 billion US dollars) by 2025.

China and the United States are ahead of the global competition to dominate AI, according to
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by the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published January.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
From NYT. This could be the answer to bridge the gap between urban and rural health care in china

A.I. Shows Promise as a Physician Assistant

Doctors competed against A.I. computers to recognize illnesses on magnetic resonance images of a human brain during a competition in Beijing last year. The human doctors lost.CreditMark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
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Image
Doctors competed against A.I. computers to recognize illnesses on magnetic resonance images of a human brain during a competition in Beijing last year. The human doctors lost.CreditCreditMark Schiefelbein/Associated Press
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By
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Feb. 11, 2019
Each year, millions of Americans walk out of a doctor’s office
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. Physicians try to be systematic when identifying illness and disease, but bias creeps in. Alternatives are overlooked.

Now a group of researchers in the United States and China has tested a potential remedy for all-too-human frailties: artificial intelligence.

In a paper published on Monday in Nature Medicine, the scientists reported that they had built a system that
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— from influenza to meningitis — after processing the patient’s symptoms, history, lab results and other clinical data.

The system was highly accurate, the researchers said, and one day may assist doctors in diagnosing patients with complex or rare conditions.

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On Monday, President Trump
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meant to spur the development of A.I. across government, academia and industry in the United States. As part of this “American A.I. Initiative,” the administration will encourage federal agencies and universities to share data that can drive the development of automated systems.

Pooling health care data is a particularly difficult endeavor. Whereas researchers went to a single Chinese hospital for all the data they needed to develop their artificial-intelligence system, gathering such data from American facilities is rarely so straightforward.

“You have go to multiple places. The equipment is never the same. You have to make sure the data is anonymized,” said Dr. George Shih, associate professor of clinical radiology Weill Cornell Medical Center and co-founder of MD.ai, a company that helps researchers label data for A.I. services. “Even if you get permission, it is a massive amount of work.”

After reshaping internet services, consumer devices and driverless cars in the early part of the decade, deep learning is moving rapidly into myriad areas of health care. Many organizations,
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, are developing and testing systems that analyze electronic health records in an effort to flag medical conditions such as osteoporosis, diabetes, hypertension and heart failure.

Similar technologies are being built to automatically detect signs of illness and disease in X-rays, M.R.I.s and eye scans.

The new system relies on a
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, a breed of artificial intelligence that is accelerating the development of everything from health care to
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to
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. A neural network can learn tasks largely on its own by analyzing vast amounts of data.

Using the technology, Dr. Kang Zhang, chief of ophthalmic genetics at the University of California, San Diego, has built systems that can analyze eye scans for hemorrhages, lesions and other signs of diabetic blindness. Ideally, such systems would serve as a first line of defense, screening patients and pinpointing those who need further attention.

Now Dr. Zhang and his colleagues have created a system that can diagnose an even wider range of conditions by recognizing patterns in text, not just in medical images. This may augment what doctors can do on their own, he said.

“In some situations, physicians cannot consider all the possibilities,” he said. “This system can spot-check and make sure the physician didn’t miss anything.”

The experimental system analyzed the electronic medical records of nearly 600,000 patients at the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center in southern China, learning to associate common medical conditions with specific patient information gathered by doctors, nurses and other technicians.

First, a group of trained physicians annotated the hospital records, adding labels that identified information related to certain medical conditions. The system then analyzed the labeled data.

Then the neural network was given new information, including a patient’s symptoms as determined during a physical examination. Soon it was able to make connections on its own between written records and observed symptoms.

When tested on unlabeled data, the software could rival the performance of experienced physicians. It was more than 90 percent accurate at diagnosing asthma; the accuracy of physicians in the study ranged from 80 to 94 percent.

In diagnosing gastrointestinal disease, the system was 87 percent accurate, compared to the physicians’ accuracy of 82 to 90 percent.

Able to recognize patterns in data that humans could never identify on their own, neural networks can be enormously powerful in the right situation. But even experts have difficulty understanding why such networks make particular decisions and how they teach themselves.

As a result, extensive testing is needed to reassure both doctors and patients that these systems are reliable.

Experts said extensive clinical trials are now needed for Dr. Zhang’s system, given the difficulty of interpreting decisions made by neural networks.

“Medicine is a slow-moving field,” said Ben Shickel, a researcher at the University of Florida who specializes in the use of deep learning for health care. “No one is just going to deploy one of these techniques without rigorous testing that shows exactly what is going on.”

It could be years before deep-learning systems are deployed in emergency rooms and clinics. But some are closer to real-world use: Google is now running clinical trials of its eye-scan system at two hospitals in southern India.

Deep-learning diagnostic tools are more likely to flourish in countries outside the United States, Dr. Zhang said. Automated screening systems may be particularly useful in places where doctors are scarce, including in India and China.

The system built by Dr. Zhang and his colleagues benefited from the large scale of the data set gathered from the hospital in Guangzhou. Similar data sets from American hospitals are typically smaller, both because the average hospital is smaller and because regulations make it difficult to pool data from multiple facilities.

Dr. Zhang said he and his colleagues were careful to protect patients’ privacy in the new study. But he acknowledged that researchers in China may have an advantage when it comes to collecting and analyzing this kind of data.

“The sheer size of the population — the sheer size of the data — is a big difference,” he said.
 

tidalwave

Senior Member
Registered Member
This has nothing to do with AI.
It has more to do with Huawei aspires to be a chipset component supplier.
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Beside 5G , AI, and Server chipsets, Huawei is the leading TV chipset supplier in China with 50% marketshare.

I don't like the title of the thread, AI is getting overblown, it's only one field. In fact the price conscious folks, people in general are not willing to fork out the extra for AI accelerator such as in the phone. It still a luxury, not a must have feature.

In the future, I could see Huawei provide GPU, Silicon photonics, and networking chipset.
 
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Weaasel

Senior Member
Registered Member
Via xyz China has no other choice but pressing on with the development of domestic chip making equipment and basic chip making material. I see opportunity instead of disaster It will provide the much needed impetus to buy domestic equipment! Where before they were relegated to 2nd tier supplier

"We still see a massive gap with global rivals," Ding said last week at the conference. "But the [Washington-Beijing] trade frictions are not necessarily bad for us... At least all of us from the government, business leaders, to ordinary people have reached a consensus that it is important to form a local chip ecosystem as soon as possible."

China seeks chip self-sufficiency in face of US export control fears

CHENG TING-FANG, Nikkei staff writer
7-9 minutes

Chinese chip industry is worried not just that the trade battle could hit demand but also concerned that the Chinese government could retaliate on the U.S. with limits on American imports. © Reuters

WUXI, China -- Yao Lijun knows how important it is for China to break the dominance of U.S. and Japanese companies in making materials for chip production. "Otherwise, other countries could easily seize us by our throats and cut the lifeline anytime," said the chairman of Konfoong Materials International, one of China's largest suppliers to the chip industry.

Konfoong Materials (KFMI) is China's largest maker of ultrapure titanium, copper and several chipmaking materials. When Yao Lijun founded the company in 2005, he says he had already realized the importance of developing self-sufficiency in semiconductors. Yet few of China's business leaders or government officials shared his vision.

That has changed since the mounting trade war with the U.S., which could escalate even further in the coming days with a new wave of tariffs.

"The whole industry has finally learned a hard lesson and recognizes that we have to develop everything, literally everything, including chip materials that were relatively unpopular but crucial on our own," said Yao at last week's Integrated Circuit Industry Development Seminar, one of the Chinese chip industry's most important annual gatherings. Relying on the global industry may no longer be sustainable, he added.

Yao's remarks underscore the increasing concern in China's burgeoning chip industry that, in addition to new tariffs, President Donald Trump's administration could soon step up controls to prevent the export of crucial semiconductor tools and materials to China.

Although it is still uncertain whether the U.S. will move ahead with export controls, many tech companies are playing it safe by looking for non U.S. suppliers to avoid further trade war risk. Nikkei Asian Review reported earlier this year that many Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, Haier, Media Group, BYD, and others have already quietly shifted some chip orders outside of the U.S.

Chinese chip manufacturers are also looking beyond American providers, according to industry executives.

"Chinese chipmakers have started to talk to Japanese and European equipment and material vendors and others to initiate a contingency plan," Yang Wenge, vice president of marketing strategy at Entegris, a U.S. chip material builder told the Nikkei Asian Review. The chip industry is worried not just that the trade battle could hit demand. They are also concerned that the Chinese government could retaliate on the U.S. with limits on American imports.

Restrictions on U.S. exports of equipment and materials would deal a severe blow to China's ambitions to build a domestic semiconductor industry. It could cause massive delays in chip factories currently under construction in China including the country's first advanced memory project Yangtze Memory Technologies. New controls could also hinder expansion by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co., the nation's top contract chipmaker, while many global players such as Samsung, SK Hynix, TSMC, and Intel are also expanding production sites in the country.

The prospect of a U.S. crackdown has sparked calls for action to accelerate the development of a Chinese supply chain.

"We know we are lagging far behind... and we realize the cutthroat danger," said Ye Tianchun, Director of the Institute of Microelectronics at the Chinese Academy of Science, the country's top research agency. "We know we have to be self-reliant and develop an industry over which we have control. I urge domestic chip manufacturers to strongly support emerging local equipment and material suppliers."

Chip tools and materials are essential enablers for manufacturing semiconductors, yet China-based companies account for less than 1% of the global market, according to industry association, SEMI. While China has developed competitive chip designers such as Huawei's chip unit Hisilicon Technologies and leading chip testing and packaging house Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology, it still struggles to create its own versions of Applied Material, Lam Research, KLA-Tencor, and Dow Chemical -- the world's top equipment, materials and chemicals suppliers to the chip industry.

The challenge has been to build expertise through years of basic science research, while it also takes years to pass durability and quality tests, says an official at China's Ministry of Science and Technology. As a result, China's chip makers and designers have been heavily reliant on foreign suppliers and they are now vulnerable, she says.

"We really face serious threats and risks brought by the escalating trade war," Chiu Kang, deputy supervisor at China's Major National Science and Technology Project, a program focused on developing the sector. "Most of the chipmakers we talk to hope to find domestic suppliers as soon as possible to replace foreign ones."

Nevertheless there are those who see some upside in the fallout from the U.S. administration's crackdown on tech exports to China. It could help to accelerate the government's ambitions to develop self-sufficiency say some in the industry.

In 2014 Beijing launched a 137.8 billion yuan ($20.1bn) fund to invest in the sector, with the aim of encouraging further investment from local government and private capital. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund has so far and financed about 50 companies involved in manufacturing, design, testing, packaging and equipment, and materials. The so-called "Big IC fund" has supported local equipment and material makers such as Naura Technology Group and Anji Microelectronics, China's answer to Applied Materials and Dow Chemical. However, this sector accounts for just 8% of the funding and more needs to be done.

This year Premier Le Keqiang made the chip industry a national priority and the second stage of funding is expected to reach more than 200 billion yuan. Ding Wenwu, head of the big IC fund says the new funding could be used to develop advanced chip technology such as 3D NAND flash memory, core processors and field-programmable gate-array [FPGA] chips, a type of high-end programmable chip. He also stressed that building a Chinese supply chain of equipment and materials was crucial too.

"We still see a massive gap with global rivals," Ding said last week at the conference. "But the [Washington-Beijing] trade frictions are not necessarily bad for us... At least all of us from the government, business leaders, to ordinary people have reached a consensus that it is important to form a local chip ecosystem as soon as possible."

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The complacency on the part of the Chinese is incredible, and it seems as though the ambition to be fully capable of producing the whole range of high tech products was considerably lacking. Only when it became clearly evident that the United States was willing to place an embargo on all high tech exports to China and force other countries to do the same did they real get their act together.
 

tower9

New Member
Registered Member
The complacency on the part of the Chinese is incredible, and it seems as though the ambition to be fully capable of producing the whole range of high tech products was considerably lacking. Only when it became clearly evident that the United States was willing to place an embargo on all high tech exports to China and force other countries to do the same did they real get their act together.

Yes it is pretty incredible that they had no urgency to do this. Even while they expanded in a range of other tech areas still dependent on these crucial components that could bring the whole house of cards down. For some reason, I don't think the Japanese would ever do this, especially if the US was a rival state of theirs.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
The complacency on the part of the Chinese is incredible, and it seems as though the ambition to be fully capable of producing the whole range of high tech products was considerably lacking. Only when it became clearly evident that the United States was willing to place an embargo on all high tech exports to China and force other countries to do the same did they real get their act together.

Agree I also think the same thing I believe that is because people in 50's and 60's still worshiping the west on the altar. They have this sense of inferiority, insecurity that everything the west produce must be superior and does not want to use domestic equivalent to support domestic supplier.
There are exception like Ren Zhengfei

And people in the economic planning lap up the west propaganda of free trade and non interventionist government. unfettered Capitalism etc. Now they surprised that the west ply dirty and does not abide by so called free capitalism they do what they charged China as interventionist but no MSM complain about it

Compare that to the Japanese early on Toyota use to make textile machinery but at the end of last century they decide to make their own automobile and they support their own supply chain down to the electronic like Renesas
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I hope this latest chip banned wake them up and start in earnest developing their chip eco system It is the case do or die . If they success it prove their mettle and if not then they become slave of US
They have one trick up their sleeve they should liberalize their immigration policy and granted every overseas Chinese residence permit regardless of citizenship asap It is their only hope
 
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zealotaiur485

New Member
Registered Member
The complacency on the part of the Chinese is incredible, and it seems as though the ambition to be fully capable of producing the whole range of high tech products was considerably lacking. Only when it became clearly evident that the United States was willing to place an embargo on all high tech exports to China and force other countries to do the same did they real get their act together.

This incident, in some ways, have shown the CPC doesn't control the private sector that much.
If it were up to the govt, every critical tech component would be sourced from domestic suppliers.
Instead the local Chinese businesses themselves have chosen to buy from foreign suppliers which in turn led to domestic suppliers to become uncompetitive and unable to make enough profits to invest in R&D - creating a cycle where foreign companies dominate the high tech industries and local companies are lagging behind.

IMO, China's govt and Chinese businesses have vastly underestimated how insecure the USA is in regards to China's rise.
The fear of losing to China has essentially become the norm in the USA (govt, media and general public). There's no way the USA would step aside willingly and peacefully to allow China to become the new #1. Hopefully with this trade war, China starts to wake up from its naivete of the outside world.
 

SpicySichuan

Senior Member
Registered Member
IMO, China's govt and Chinese businesses have vastly underestimated how insecure the USA is in regards to China's rise.
The fear of losing to China has essentially become the norm in the USA (govt, media and general public). There's no way the USA would step aside willingly and peacefully to allow China to become the new #1. Hopefully with this trade war, China starts to wake up from its naivete of the outside world.
Just like Britain would never allow a single power to dominate the European Continent and build a Navy that rivaled Britain's. Otherwise, Pax Britannia would be in jeopardy. Pax Americana is pretty much the reincarnation of Pax Britannia, but much more global and on steroid. Both the British Empire and the U.S. are driven by insecurity based on threats to their global empires, except while the British one was commercial, and U.S. one is based on both liberal ideologies and commercial dominance.
 

Tyler

Captain
Registered Member
Yes it is pretty incredible that they had no urgency to do this. Even while they expanded in a range of other tech areas still dependent on these crucial components that could bring the whole house of cards down. For some reason, I don't think the Japanese would ever do this, especially if the US was a rival state of theirs.

Are all the chips used in the military equipment self-sufficient?
 
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