The United States, the current leader in artificial intelligence, and China, its great rival, are engaged in a war to conquer the key technologies that will mark the cyber future in the coming years. Everything points to the Asians taking the lead.
” China will soon lead the way in artificial intelligence, if it doesn’t already.” The North American consultancy firm CB Insights points out a very significant fact as an element that reflects this statement: for the first time, the economic value of start-ups that were born in China in 2017 – although in number they only represented 9% of the total number of those that emerged in the world – exceeded the value of those created in the United States . The Asian giant accounted for 48% of the global capital invested in innovative companies, compared to 38% that went to the United States. The rest of the world shared the remaining 14%.
China’s unstoppable rise: how the Asian giant is redefining the future of artificial intelligence 
But what is the reason for this success? The main reason is that China is executing to perfection an aggressive approach designed to lead the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Already in some areas, says CB Insights , the Asians have clearly taken the lead over the Americans. And in large part, the success is due to the significant help of its government, which is promoting a futuristic plan that covers everything from agriculture and smart logistics to military applications and new job opportunities that are growing in the field of AI.
Massive investment in artificial intelligence positions the Asian country as a leader
Much of the billions of yuan that the Beijing government is investing are going to the country’s startups, which are developing AI projects in all kinds of industries , from biomedical to the media. The leap is huge if we take into account that in 2016 China had represented only 11.3% of global funding in this branch of computing.
According to a report by the consultancy firm PwC, global GDP will be 14% higher by 2030 – equivalent to $15.7 trillion, more than the current output of China and India combined – as a result of overripe spying. The Asian giant’s economy will benefit the most – its GDP will grow by 26% – followed by North America, with 14.5%. China, says PwC, will begin to overtake the United States within ten years.
CB Insights experts point out that Chinese companies’ efforts in AI are clearly reflected in their patent activity, which already clearly exceeds that of the United States in terms of applications and publications in this field. In deep learning or machine learning, for example, the number of patents published in the Asian country is six times higher than in the United States.
Facial recognition and AI chips
The two prominent technologies fueling AI growth in China are facial recognition and artificial intelligence chips. The former powers the government’s ambitious domestic surveillance plans, while the latter is a direct challenge to chips manufactured by American brands such as Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA.
Megvii, SenseTime and the startup CloudWalk – have all managed to rise to unicorn status in a very short time. In the context of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, a unicorn is a technology company that has reached a value of one billion dollars at one stage of its capital raising process. Megvii is ranked eleventh on the list of the fifty smartest companies of MIT Technology Review in 2017. Its specialization is computer vision. Its facial recognition product, Face++, has been able to identify and distinguish more than one hundred million faces so far.
SenseTime, meantime, makes AI-powered supervision software for the Chinese police. According to CB Insights, SenseTime is the most valuable AI startup in the world, currently valued at over $4.5 billion.
Lucrative sectors of technology
Image analysis is one of the most lucrative commercial applications of the technology, and even more so in China. SenseTime claims to have more than 400 customers and partners, and also sells its AI services to enhance camera apps for Chinese smartphone makers such as OPPO and Vivo. It also offers augmented reality (AR) effects and filters on social media platforms such as Weibo, and provides identity verification for financial and retail apps in China.
SenseTime also equips Chinese police forces with facial recognition and tracking services . The company, which is headquartered in Beijing and Shenzhen, says the software it provides for the security bureau in Guangzhou, which has a metropolitan population of around twenty-five million people, is used to analyze surveillance footage of crime scenes and photos from a generic database. With these, police have already been able to identify more than two thousand suspects and solve more than one hundred crimes.
CloudWalk is also considered one of the big names in facial recognition. The startup is the main provider of the facial recognition technology used by the Bank of China. In 2018, CloudWalk signed a deal to provide the Zimbabwean government with a facial tracking system with a nationwide database and a monitoring program for the African country’s main transportation hubs.
Internet giants
But the real leaders of China’s AI market are internet giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, a trio known in global tech circles as BAT. Today, China’s AI field encompasses basic services, such as data resources and computing platforms; hardware products, such as industrial and service robots; business intelligence services; and technical capabilities, such as visual identification and machine learning. According to Chinese consultancy iResearch, voice recognition and visual recognition account for 60% and 12.5% of China’s total AI market, respectively.
Of the companies involved in artificial intelligence, 71% are focused on application development, with the remainder working in algorithms . 55% have specialized in computer vision, 13% in natural language processing, and 9% in fundamental machine learning.
Present in both markets
China is also competing with the United States for dominance in AI chip technology.
Baidu and JD are also investing in AI companies abroad, including in the United States: they recently took a stake in ZestFinance, Tencent took a stake in New York-based ObEN, and start-ups such as Wuxi, NextCODE and Pony. AI companies are already operating in both countries. According to CB Insights, “there are already more Chinese investments in AI start-ups in the United States than the other way around.”
The investment bank Goldman Sachs points out that China’s huge population, much of which is connected to the internet, gives it a great advantage in data generation: “It is understandable that the Asian country generates approximately 13% of the world’s digital information.” In addition, Huawei, Xiaomi, Foxcom, ZTE and Hisense are other technological giants that are on the crest of the wave and that also have a lot to say for the Asian country to be, in a few years, the undisputed leader in artificial intelligence.
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