Thread by @ProsaicView

1/n In my Moneycontrol column today, I look at the race between the US and China to win in Artificial Intelligence...moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/i…

2/n A decade ago, China was far behind. Now they are reportedly ahead in facial recognition, speech technology and several other areas though the US, according to some observers, still leads in others

3/n China is throwing more researchers and more money than the US is. It came out with a focused plan in 2017 with specific milestones to achieve in 2020 and 2025, by which time it wanted to be conclusively ahead of the west in AI

4/n It has a few other advantages -- it generates more data and there are no privacy concerns it needs to bother about with that data. In deep learning, the more data, the better. The government is pretty clear it will do whatever is necessary to win this race

5/n But it also has a few disadvantages -- it primarily only manages to attract only Chinese researchers -- either those trained in China or those who studied in the US

6/n The US on the other hand manages to get researchers from every major country where AI research is taking place, including Germany, Singapore. the UK etc

7/n The west has an advantage in terms of access to better hardware. The best GPUs are made by Nvidia and they were used for the Deep Learning machines mostly

8/n But now, both the US (Google etc) and China are using AI to design special AI chips that will be even better than the commercial GPUs made by Nvidia...

9/n The issue is that China, despite its many chip foundries, still lags behind in chip fabrication though it is spending billions to catch up. The US too is spending billions...

10/n The US is also blocking the sale of the special machines made by the Dutch company ASML to China . These machines are absolutely necessary for the latest generation of chip foundries...

11/n However, the AI race is far from over. Despite all the applications we see today, the technology has not reached anywhere near its full capabilities. It will get a huge boost when Quantum Computers become a reality. The US and China are locked in a race for that too...

12/n and n/n But that is another story... and the practical Quantum Computers might be a decade or more away