The new companies that dispute the hegemony of the development of artificial intelligence maintain fierce competition since the winner will obtain an abysmal competitive advantage at the economic level . So much so, that there is hardly a very small group of private companies on the game board.
There are basically seven, and they are called the Seven Giants of the AI era : Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
Half American, half Chinese
If we look at the origin of these corporate giants, we will see that they are distributed almost equally between the United States and China . Their assets are the huge sums of money that are invested in research and development plus the data reserves (big data or big data) with which to feed the algorithms they design.
Among the Seven Giants of AI , the company most likely to outperform the rest is Google, more specifically its parent company, Alphabet, which owns DeepMind and its autonomous subsidiary Waymo. In fact, Google is investing so much resources in R&D that its investment is more than double the federal funds that the United States government allocates to research in mathematics and computer science. For this reason, half of the one hundred best AI researchers and engineers in the world already work at Google , when the other half is distributed by the rest of the companies that make up the Seven Giants.
Following in the footsteps of Google are Microsoft and Facebook, but is not going to Baidu behind that of the Chinese giant was the first to address the investigation of the deep or deep learning learning, a type very sophisticated machine learning algorithms that allowed the company surpassed human skills in recognizing Chinese speech in 2015 (Microsoft reached the same milestone with English a year later).
It’s not all money
The most lagging companies are Alibaba and Tencent . However, in the field of AI not everything is supplemented by astronomical investments of money. Data is also required to feed the algorithms. In this sense, China has larger amounts of data because its citizens are more connected and lack fewer regulations to protect their privacy.
Thus, for example, Tencent has a gigantic data ecosystem, the richest of all the Giants, thanks to its WeChat app, which users use for all kinds of things, from exchanging text messages (WhatsApp style) to making transfers. of money or buy in shops, as well as order taxi services or food at home. WeChat has more than 889 million daily active users .
For its part, Alibaba has taken the lead in massive AI-powered networks that optimize city services by leveraging data from the thousands of facial recognition video cameras that have already been installed, as well as apps based on the geolocation. This full access to data is the fruit of collaboration with the government of Hangzhou, Alibaba’s hometown .
In other words, Google has an advantage, but it is not an advantage that will last forever. Behind come six other companies investing monstrous sums of money , in some cases, or collecting astronomical amounts of data, in others. Not surprisingly, cities like Xiong’an New Area , in China, are building entire areas of artificial intelligence, focused on autonomous vehicles. After all, as Robert Mercer, founder of Cambridge Analytica (who used data from Facebook to better understand voters during the 2016 US presidential campaign) put it: “There is no better data than more data .”
