TechScape: how China became an AI superpower ready to take on the United States
Up for discussion in this week's newsletter: a mix of state support and entrepreneurial zeal means China is poised to win the next tech revolution - just as a former Google exec predicted
China had its sputnik moment in March 2016. That month an artificial intelligence programme, AlphaGo, beat a South Korean grandmaster at Go, an extremely complex and demanding Chinese board game. The five game series was watched by an audience of more than 280 million viewers across China. In May 2017 AlphaGo defeated China's 19-year-old prodigy Ke Jie; two months later the Chinese government issued an AI strategy which projected that the country would become the global centre of AI innovation by 2030. By year's end, China accounted for nearly half of all AI venture funding globally.
That is the story of how China became an AI powerhouse, as told by Kai-Fu Lee, a renowned expert in the field, in his book AI Superpowers. Lee, a 60-year-old former president of Google China who has witnessed the country's tech revolution first-hand, is now chairman and chief executive of Beijing-based tech investment firm Sinovation Ventures. The book was published three years ago and it predicted that China would win the AI contest with the United States - the other great power in AI.
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