National Ambitions

Chinese entrepreneurs want national policies to back up the country’s Artificial Intelligence efforts

By Yu Xiaodong

AI in China

Photo by cfp

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence programme developed by Google, has just won the first of three games against China’s Go prodigy Ke Jie in Hainan. This follows Alpha Go’s defeat of Lee Sedol, another top player of this ancient board game in March 2016. With its complicated positioning and endless possibilities, Go is supposed to be more difficult than chess for AI programme to master.

But AlphaGo has also got other competitors in China. One of them is Jueyi, or FineArt, developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent. After winning 10 straight games against Ke Jie, the world’s No. 1 player, in February, Jueyi won the championship title in the 10th Computer Go UEC Cup in Japan in March. Although AlphaGo was absent, the event attracted 30 of the world’s best Go AI programmes, including Facebook’s Darkforest, Japan’s Deep Zen Go and France’s Crazy Stone.

Jueyi represents the rising ambitions of Chinese tech companies in the emerging field of artificial intelligence, previously dominated by US companies.

AI Boom

China’s AI sector, like most forms of computing in China, is led by the BAT, an acronym referring to China’s Internet triumvirate Baidu, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings. Baidu is known for its dominant search engine, Alibaba Group for the country’s top e-commerce platform, and Tencent for social networks and gaming.

With an estimated 730 million Internet users and 630 million smart phone users in China, the development of the Internet in recent years has allowed the three companies access to a huge volume of data, a major advantage in AI research and development.