Sophia, a life-like humanoid robot, is pictured at the UN headquarters in New York, Oct. 11, 2017. Sophia was here attending a meeting on "The Future of Everything - Sustainable Development in the Age of Rapid Technological Change". (Xinhua/Li Muzi)
WASHINGTON, March 1 (Xinhua) -- China is gaining momentum in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, which has been translating its huge market size into commercialized innovations. This is a boon instead of a threat.
The cry-wolf alarms that America is losing a race for supremacy in the AI industry by comparing China's catching-up to America's Sputnik panic in the late 1950s, have, in a sense, misinterpreted or misrepresented the true AI story.
A typical misinterpretation goes to the "global tech cold war," which was put forward by Eurasia Group, a New York-headquartered think tank, arguing that the winner in AI and super-computing between the United States and China will dominate the coming decades, both economically and geopolitically.
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Visitors watch a robot dance at the World Robot Conference 2017 in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 25, 2017. Over 300 artificial intelligent (AI) specialists and representatives of over 150 robot enterprises attended the conference. (Xinhua/Li Mingfang)
The Chinese company has ranked top in a reading comprehension dataset created by Stanford University. It shows that the wit of iFlytek platform is slightly slower than human performance, but smarter than Microsoft Research Asia ranking second.
But this is not a winner-take-all game. The artificial intelligence involves a progressive learning that requires continuous flow of AI-ready data. It is open sourced and will become stronger with more players.
Honda Motor demostrates Ai-miimo, Honda's concept model of AI-installed lawn mower, during media preview of the 45th Tokyo Motor Show in Tokyo, Japan October 25, 2017. (Xinhua/REUTERS)
China's advantages in artificial intelligence lie in its huge size of internet users: over 770 million in 2017, which make up an ideal trainer database for any new algorithm. Algorithm is deemed as a crucial element in the new area, together with AI chips and massive data.
A recent medical advance of AI-based screening for eye diseases and pneumonia, published in the journal of Cell last week, has been jointly made by scientists of University of California San Diego and China's Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center.
It should be noted that thousands of pneumonia X-ray images used in the research came from Guangzhou and about 200,000 optical coherence tomography images came from Beijing and Shanghai. Obviously, the therapeutic AI platform will provide substantial benefits to patients in both countries.
Liu Qingfeng, iFlyTek's CEO, told Xinhua at CES that massive data sets, algorithms and professionals are a must-have combination for AI, which "requires global cooperation" and "no company can play hegemony."
On Wednesday, Chinese tech startup SenseTime Co. became the first company to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ambitious program to open AI's black box or how AI thinks.
Realistically, this sector has something to do with competition and more with cooperation, which allows for more than one winner.