China more advanced in Artificial Intelligence application

The US is in a leading position in artificial intelligence (AI) research, but China has surpassed the US in AI application, and the sector offers both potential and challenges, industry experts said during the AI World 2016 conference held on Tuesday.

It is the first AI conference being held in China, which reflects the progress made in the country, especially in the services sector, noted Zheng Nanning, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

“China has not lagged behind other countries in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Instead, it plays an important role in innovation,” Zheng said.

In 2015, 32 of 100 surveyed Chinese AI industry companies recorded 756 million yuan ($112 million) in revenue, according to a report by AI Era, co-host of the conference.

Chinese companies have become increasingly influential in the industry in recent years, and they should team up to push forward AI development, like US tech giants – Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Amazon – did in forming an AI alliance,Yang Jing, CEO of AI Era, told the audience.

“However, Chinese researchers and companies have to do more in making technology breakthroughs, as Google is now more advanced with its DeepMind field,” she said.

Google’s DeepMind is now a leader in AI research and its application worldwide. It is focused on solving intelligence and has come up with the AlphaGo program, which beat a human professional player for the first time in October 2015.

“We have made much progress in weak AI, or non-sentient AI, but there is still a long way to go to make machines think like humans,” Deng Li, chief scientist of AI in Microsoft’s AI and Research group, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

“To achieve strong AI, the study should explore how the human brain achieves its intelligence and how to generalize it,” he said.

China has advantages in pushing forward the AI industry as it has more abundant user feedback data and application scenarios, Deng said.

The gap in research and development capabilities between Chinese tech companies and their US counterparts has been narrowing in recent years, and in terms of application, some Chinese companies are at advanced positions in certain areas such as language interaction technology and image processing, Xiang Yang, an industry expert at Beijing-based CCID Consulting, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

“However, in manufacturing aspects, foreign companies such as SoftBank’s robotic Pepper and IBM’s Watson are more advanced in building AI-powered robots,” he said.

The National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planner in China, announced a blueprint in May to build a market worth 100 billion yuan ($14.84 billion) in AI by 2018, including smart home appliances, smart cars, smart wearable devices and robots, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Development of the AI industry is highly dependent on the business and industry environments, Hu Yu, head of the research institute at China’s Siri, Anhui USTC iFlytek Co, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

“Chinese companies are now capable of competing with their foreign rivals,” he said, noting that appliances using AI are dependent on smart mobile devices, and China is a booming market in this aspect.

Though the operating systems for PCs and smartphones were developed by US companies like Microsoft or Google, the input methods were mainly developed by Chinese companies, which also shows barriers in intelligent speech and language interaction technology between countries, according to Hu.

The world’s leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions, Nuance Communications, announced plans in May to team up with iFlytek.