How is A.I. developing differently in the U.S. and in China? One aspect is the investment landscape. In a new MIT Technology Review article, the massive concentration of Chinese A.I. development in the hands of the three largest companies is emphasized and explored. While the country boasts 190 major A.I. companies, 53% of these are funded by either the search/information indexing giant Baidu (48), social networking giant Tencent (37), or e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba (31). One aspect of this configuration is that the competition is driving application-heavy research focused on producing usable A.I. products, rather than in-depth research focused on the underlying technologies. An accompanying weakness of this pursuit is that it could limit the upward potential of success in the future as the U.S. invests in more fundamental research and exploration of A.I. apart from its potential applications.
Source: The future of China’s AI industry is in the hands of just three companies – MIT Technology Review
