In addition to the Chinese government, several provinces and cities in the country, says consulting firm PwC, offer preferential policies and generous financial incentives for emerging companies in artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the city of Shenyang has established an investment fund of 20 billion yuan, 23.4 billion Hong Kong dollars, focused on the development of robotics.
These favorable policies are what have inspired innovations by companies in China in the field of AI. Established multinationals such as Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, ZTE and Tencent have been joined by emerging companies such as Megvii, iCarbonX, Mobvoi and SenseTime, and unicorns, startups with valuations of more than one billion dollars , such as Didi, Chuxing and Xiaomi. which has recently landed in Spain to sell its cheap smartphones, among other devices.
Baidu, for example, has developed a neural network-based machine translation system that has achieved speech recognition accuracy superior to that of humans. It has also launched Apollo, an open source platform for autonomous driving solutions. Tencent, for its part, has created its own AI lab, bringing together 50 world-class scientists, researchers and experts to focus on “content and games based on artificial intelligence,” notes PwC.
Ranked 11th on MIT Technology Review’s list of 50 Smartest Companies in 2017, Megvii specializes in computer vision technology. Its facial recognition product, Face ++, has recognized and distinguished more than 100 million faces in China so far. And iFlytek is a world leader in intelligent speech and natural language processing, reaching a market value of around $ 12 billion in 2017. Its speech recognition technology is capable of differentiating between all Chinese dialects.
Another company to watch, says consultancy Goldman Sachs in one of its latest AI reports, is Chinese service provider Meituan-Dianping. “It uses big data analytics to generate the most efficient delivery path in less than 100 milliseconds.” China’s largest app Didi Chuxing is also working on deep learning, human-machine interaction, machine vision, and smart driving technologies. It processes more than 4,500 terabytes of data, receives more than 20 billion routing requests, and handles more than 20 million requests on average per day, according to Goldman. Hikvision uses artificial intelligence for surveillance products, including smart cameras. Mobvoi, for its part, focuses on speech and natural language, and SenseTime is focused on computer vision and deep learning, and in April it obtained 450 million dollars of financing in a round with investors, and currently the experts value it at about 4,500 million dollars, about 37,000 million euros.
The manufacturers of DJI drones and UBTECH humanoid robots are other Chinese companies that innovate using AI and that Goldman Sachs stands out as world leaders already today, but that have a huge innovative path in artificial intelligence to the next years.
At the same time that this explosion of innovative AI companies is taking place in China, a Pentagon report considers Chinese companies a potential threat to national security. To the point that the United States Department of Defense wants the Government to prohibit Chinese investments on American soil, despite the fact that they have already invested more than 700 million dollars in new American companies in the last six years. Huawei and ZTE are already being investigated by the Government of Donald Trump , and the American operators have decided for the moment to deny the purchase of smart devices from these companies in the United States.
In any case, and as much as the United States wants to close the door to Chinese companies, ” the second largest economy in the world has already become an important global competitor in the use of artificial intelligence, ” according to a report by Goldman Sachs, titled ‘China’s Rise in Artificial Intelligence’. Therefore, we must be attentive to all the Chinese companies mentioned in this article, and others that will surely be born in the coming years thanks to government aid and the great development of AI in China. And if the Chinese government achieves its goal, by 2030 the United States will have been outmatched in AI development.
