Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts

Monday, February 13, 2023

Lies, racism and AI: IT experts point to serious flaws in ChatGPT

ChatGPT may have blown away many who have asked questions of it, but scientists are far less enthusiastic. Lacking data privacy, wrong information and an apparent built-in racism are just a few of the concerns some experts have with the latest 'breakthrough' in AI. — Photo: Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa

BERLIN: ChatGPT may have blown away many who have asked questions of it, but scientists are far less enthusiastic. Lacking data privacy, wrong information and an apparent built-in racism are just a few of the concerns some experts have with the latest 'breakthrough' in AI.

With great precision, it can create speeches and tell stories – and in just a matter of seconds. The AI software ChatGPT introduced late last year by the US company OpenAI is arguably today's number-one worldwide IT topic.

But the language bot, into which untold masses of data have been fed, is not only an object of amazement, but also some scepticism.

Scientists and AI experts have been taking a close look at ChatGPT, and have begun issuing warnings about major issues – data protection, data security flaws, hate speech, fake news.

"At the moment, there's all this hype," commented Ruth Stock-Homburg, founder of Germany's Leap in Time Lab research centre and a Darmstadt Technical University business administration professor. "I have the feeling that this system is scarcely being looked at critically."

"You can manipulate this system"

ChatGPT has a very broad range of applications. In a kind of chat field a user can, among others, ask it questions and receive answers. Task assignments are also possible – for example on the basis of some fundamental information ChatGPT can write a letter or even an essay.

In a project conducted together with the Darmstadt Technical University, the Leap in Time Lab spent seven weeks sending thousands of queries to the system to ferret out any possible weak points. "You can manipulate this system," Stock-Homburg says.

In a recent presentation, doctoral candidate and AI language expert Sven Schultze highlighted the weak points of the text bot. Alongside a penchant for racist expressions, it has an approach to sourcing information that is either erroneous or non-existent, Schultze says. A question posed about climate change produced a link to an internet page about diabetes.

"As a general rule the case is that the sources and/or the scientific studies do not even exist," he said. The software is based on data from the year 2021. Accordingly, it identifies world leaders from then and does not know about the war in Ukraine.

"It can then also happen that it simply lies or, for very specialised topics, invents information," Schultze said.

Sources are not simple to trace

He noted for example that with direct questions containing criminal content there do exist security instructions and mechanisms. "But with a few tricks you can circumvent the AI and security instructions," Schultze said.

With another approach, you can get the software to show how to generate fraudulent emails. It will also immediately explain three ways that scammers use the so-called "grandchild trick" on older people.

ChatGPT also can provide a how-to for breaking into a home, with the helpful advice that if you bump into the owner you can use weapons or physical force on them.

Ute Schmid, Chair of Cognitive Systems at the Otto Friedrich University in Bamberg, says that above all the challenge is that we can't find out how the AI reaches its conclusions. "A deeper problem with the GPT3 model lies in the fact that it is not possible to trace when and how which sources made their way into the respective statements," she said.

Despite such grave shortcomings, Schmidt still argues that the focus should not just concern the mistakes or possible misuse of the new system, the latter prospect being students having their homework or research papers written by the software. "Rather, I think that we should ask ourselves, what chances are presented us with such AI systems?"

Researchers in general advocate how AI can expand – possibly even promote – our competencies, and not limit them. "This means that in the area of education I must also ask myself – as perhaps was the case 30 years ago with pocket calculators – how can I shape education with AI systems like ChatGPT?"

Data privacy concerns

All the same, concerns remain about data security and protecting data. "What can be said is that ChatGPT takes in a variety of data from the user, stores and processes it and then at a given time trains this model accordingly," says Christian Holthaus, a certified data protection expert in Frankfurt. The problem is that all the servers are located in the United States.

"This is the actual problem – if you do not succeed in establishing this technology in Europe, or to have your own," Holthaus said. In the foreseeable future there will be no data protection-compliant solution. Adds Stock-Homburg about European Union data protection regulations: "This system here is regarded as rather critical."

ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI, one of the leading AI firms in the US. Software giant Microsoft invested US$1bil (RM4.25bil) in the company back in 2019 and recently announced plans to pump further billions into it. The concern aims to make ChatGPT available to users of its own cloud service Azure and the Microsoft Office package.

"Still an immature system"

Stock-Homburg says that at the moment ChatGPT is more for private users to toy around with – and by no means something for the business sector or security-relevant areas. "We have no idea how we should be deal with this as yet still immature system," she said.

Oliver Brock, Professor of Robotics and Biology Laboratory at the Technical University Berlin, sees no "breakthrough" yet in AI research. Firstly, development of AI does not go by leaps and bounds, but is a continuing process. Secondly, the project only represents a small part of AI research.

But ChatGPT might be regarded as a breakthrough in another area – the interface between humans and the internet. "The way in which, with a great deal of computing effort, these huge amounts of data from the internet are made accessible to a broad public intuitively and in natural language can be called a breakthrough," says Brock. – dpa

By Oliver Pietschmann, Christoph Dernbach

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ChatGPT And The Future Of AI, Turkey Earthquakes.Part 1

H ow Scientists Predict Where Earthquakes Will Strike Next The pair of earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria this week left the region .

Tech giants explore new OpenAI opportunities as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched

OpenAI, which Elon Musk helped to co-found back in 2015, is the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT. The company opened Ch...

Microsoft to enhance search engine, browser

Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarise web pages, synthesis...

Thursday, February 9, 2023

Microsoft to enhance search engine, browser

Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarise web pages, synthesise disparate sources, even compose emails and translate them into more consumers’ hands. — Reuters

REDMOND: Microsoft Corp is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge Web browser with artificial intelligence (AI), the company says, signalling its ambition to retake the lead in consumer technology markets where it has fallen behind.

The maker of the Windows operating system is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc’s Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.

Now, Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarise web pages, synthesise disparate sources, even compose emails and translate them into more consumers’ hands.

Microsoft expects every percentage point of share it gains will bring in another US$2bil (RM8.6bil) in search advertising revenue.

Working with the startup OpenAI, Microsoft is aiming to leapfrog its Silicon Valley rival and potentially claim vast returns from tools that generally speed up content creation by automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.

That would affect products for businesses, such as the cloud computing and collaboration tools Microsoft sells, as well as the consumer Internet.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told reporters in a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The company’s share of search so far is about an estimated 10th of the market. Still, many investors see new technology as a win for all players. Microsoft’s stock closed 4.2% higher on Tuesday, while Alphabet gained 4.6%.

The power of so-called “generative AI” that can create virtually any text or image dawned on the public last year with the release of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation from OpenAI.

Its human-like responses to any prompt have given people new ways to think about the possibilities of marketing, writing term papers, disseminating news or querying information online.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.

The company hopes user feedback will improve its AI, which Microsoft officials said may still produce factually inaccurate information known as hallucinations. Meanwhile, it has worked to prevent the misuse of its technology.

Underpinning the new Bing is what Microsoft is calling the Prometheus model - OpenAI’s most powerful technology, informed as needed by real-time web data from Bing.

That means Bing’s chatbot can brief consumers on current events, a step beyond ChatGPT’s answers that are currently limited to data as of 2021.

Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for search and AI, told Reuters the tech advances his team witnessed last summer emboldened the company to move ahead with an AI-infused Bing.

Microsoft’s chief financial officer also said OpenAI’s “new, next-generation” technology is powering its search engine, though officials declined to specify if this entailed the startup’s highly anticipated upgrade known as GPT-4.

Microsoft is aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its entire suite of products, not just search.

In the near term, Gartner analyst Jason Wong said Microsoft’s “partnership with OpenAI is more relevant for its business customers.

It could offer “disruptive opportunities” in consumer businesses as well.

“Except for gaming, Microsoft has not been a leader in key consumer technologies, such as search, mobile and social media,” he added.

Google has nonetheless taken note of Microsoft’s challenge.

On Monday, it unveiled a chatbot of its own called Bard, and it is planning to release its own AI in search that can synthesise material when no simple answer exists online.

Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will likewise intensify competition – with Google’s Chrome competitor.

However, the Redmond-based company expects to roll out the updated Bing to other browsers eventually. — Reuters

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Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Tech giants explore new OpenAI opportunities as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched

OpenAI, which Elon Musk helped to co-found back in 2015, is the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT. The company opened ChatGPT up for public testing in November 2022. In under a week, the artificial intelligence model amassed over a million users, according to OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. By the end of January, ChatGPT was averaging about 13 million visitors per day. Users have had ChatGPT write everything from essays, to lyrics and even correct computer code. ChatGPT is part of a growing field of AI known as generative AI, which allows users to create brand new content including videos, music and text. But generative AI still faces a number of challenges, such as developing content that is inaccurate, biased or inappropriate. Now enterprises and the public are wondering what wide access to AI will mean for businesses and society.

Chapters: 00:00 — Intro 01:36 — Chatting with ChatGPT 03:03 — Understanding ChatGPT 06:39 — Use cases and limitations 10:09 — Future implications

10X Your Excel Skills with ChatGPT

In this step-by-step tutorial, learn how you can exponentially improve your Excel skills using OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence. Write nested functions with ease, calculate the number of unique text values in a list, write a basic invoicing macro, and more, all with just a few clicks and a few basic refinements.

ChatGPT Beginner's Guide

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7个用ChatGPT賺錢的方法如何用OpenAI人工智能赚钱机会

Driving innovation: Nigerian artist Malik Afegbua creates hyper-realistic pictures of African people using artificial intelligence at his home in Lagos. China leads the world in this technology, as well as in the number of AI journals and related publications. — Reuters

SHANGHAI: Chinese tech companies are upping the ante in the fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content sector as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched by US-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, gains wide popularity since its November debut and revolutionises the field due to its advanced conversational capabilities.

Leveraging machine learning algorithms, ChatGPT is able to mimic humanlike responses with AI-generated content (AIGC) and assist people with tasks such as writing essays and scripts, making business proposals and even checking programme bugs, which it does within seconds.

AIGC-related stocks continued to rally in the A-share market, with Chinese AI companies, such as Cloudwalk Technology and Speechocean, seeing their shares surge by the daily limit of 20% on the science and technology innovation board on Monday.

Experts said that AIGC is likely to become a new engine driving innovation in digital content production and freeing human creators from tedious tasks, with a wide range of commercial applications in fields such as culture, media, entertainment and education.

Chinese tech heavyweight Baidu Inc announced yesterday that it will complete internal testing of its AI chatbot service, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, called “Ernie Bot” in March.

The Beijing-based company has invested large sums of money in developing its Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model that has been trained on massive data over several years and possesses in-depth semantic comprehension and generation capabilities.

Robin Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of Baidu, said in January that AIGC will subvert existing content production models in the next decade, and AI has the potential to meet massive demand for content at a 10th of the cost and a hundred or thousand times faster.

Jianying, an AI-powered short-video editing app launched by Chinese tech company Byte-Dance, allows users to generate creative videos by simply putting in a few keywords or a paragraph of text.

Online gaming company Net-Ease has released its AI music creation platform, Tianyin, where users can customise a song by entering lyrics.

Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Centre at Zhejiang University’s International Business School, said that ChatGPT, as a milestone in AIGC-related technologies, uses reinforcement learning from human feedback to train the data model, with significant enhancements in natural language processing capacities that improve the logic of responses.

Chinese enterprises should step up efforts to roll out indigenous versions of the AI-powered chatbot and increase investments to improve related algorithms and computing power, Pan said.

Chen Jia, an independent strategy analyst, said: “Chinese tech enterprises have unique advantages in expanding AI application scenarios globally.”

China has made significant progress in developing the AI industry.

A Stanford University report showed that China filed more than half the world’s AI patent applications in 2021 and continued to lead the world in the number of AI journals, conference papers and related publications.

Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have invested heavily in promoting the commercial use of AI, and some Chinese AI unicorns have grown rapidly in recent years, Chen said.

But he noted that Chinese tech companies lag behind top-notch foreign competitors in fundamental research and development input and comprehensive innovation abilities.

“AIGC is in the initial stage of development, and there is still a long way to go to realise large-scale commercialisation, as the application scenarios and related laws and regulations are far from mature,” said Guo Tao, deputy head of the China Electronic Commerce Expert Service Centre.

Meanwhile, the use of AIGC-related technologies raises concerns about ethics, copyright protection and privacy, he added.— China Daily/ANN

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Sunday, September 19, 2021

Renovating democracy and the China challenge

To break out of its paralysis, the West needs to take a hard look and address three key challenges

The rise of the populist variant in the West and the rapid ascent of China in the East have prompted a rethinking of how democratic systems work - or don't. The creation of new classes of winners and losers as a consequence of globalisation and digital capitalism is also challenging how we think about the social contract and how wealth is shared. - Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen

http://media.asiasociety.org/video/1901010-Berggruen-Renovating-Democracy.mp4

Police officers watch as protesters take part in a rally against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, in Santa Monica, California, on Aug 29, 2021.PHOTO: AFP

Rethinking Democracy, the Social Contract, and Globalization

The rise of populism in the West, the rise of China in the East and the spread of peer-driven social media everywhere have stirred a rethinking of how democratic systems work—or don’t. The creation of new classes of winners and losers as a result of globalization and digital capitalism is also challenging how we think about the social contract and how wealth is shared.

The worst fear of America’s Founders—that democracy would empower demagogues—was realized in the 2016 US presidential election, when the ballot box unleashed some of the darkest forces in the body politic. Similarly, in Europe an anti-establishment political awakening of both populism and right-wing neonationalism is consigning the mainstream centrist political parties that once dominated the post–World War II political order to the margins.

Donald Trump’s election and the populist surge in Europe did not cause this crisis of governance. They are symptoms of the decay of democratic institutions across the West that, captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment have failed to address the dislocations of globalization and the disruptions of rapid technological change. To add danger to decay, the fevered partisans of populism are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, assaulting the very integrity of institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against governance itself.

Because neither the stakeholders of the waning status quo nor the upstarts of populism have offered any effective, systemic solutions to what ails the West, protracted polarization and paralysis have set in.

The Paradoxes of Governance in the Digital Age

These trials of the West are bound up with, and to a significant extent driven by, two related developments: the growing fragmentation of mass society into diverse tribes fortified by the participatory power of social media, and the advent of digital capitalism, which is divorcing productivity and wealth creation from employment and income.

We argue that these shifts present twin paradoxical challenges for governance.

First, the paradox of democracy in the age of peer-driven social networks is that, because there is more participation than ever before, never has the need been greater for countervailing practices and institutions to impartially establish facts, deliberate wise choices, mediate fair trade-offs, and forge consensus that can sustain long-term implementation of policies. Despite expectations that the Internet Age would create an informed public more capable of self-government than ever before in history, fake news, hate speech, and “alternative facts” have seriously degraded the civic discourse.

Second, the paradox of the political economy in the age of digital capitalism is that the more dynamic a perpetually innovating knowledge-driven economy is, the more robust a redefined safety net and opportunity web must be to cope with the steady disruption and gaps in wealth and power that will result.

To meet these challenges, we propose a novel approach to renovating democratic institutions that integrates new forms of direct participation into present practices of representative government while restoring to popular sovereignty the kind of deliberative ballast the American Founding Fathers thought so crucial to avoiding the suicide of republics. We further propose ways to spread wealth and opportunity fairly in a future in which intelligent machines are on track to displace labor, depress wages, and transform the nature of work to an unprecedented degree.

Where China Comes In

When populists rail against globalization that has undermined their standard of living through trade agreements, they mostly have China in mind. Few reflect that China was able to take maximum advantage of the post–Cold War US-led world order that promoted open trade and free markets precisely because of its consensus-driven and long-term-oriented one-party political system. China has shown the path to prosperity is not incompatible with authoritarian rule.

In this sense, China’s tenacious rise over the past three decades holds up a harsh mirror to an increasingly dysfunctional West. The current US president, who rode an anti-globalization wave to power, relishes battling his way through every twenty-four-hour news cycle by firing off barbed tweets at sundry foes. By contrast, China’s near-dictatorial leader has used his amassed clout to lay out a roadmap for the next thirty years.

If the price of political freedom is division and polarization, it comes at a steep opportunity cost. As the West—including Europe, riven now by populist and separatist movements—stalls in internal acrimony, China is boldly striding ahead. It has proactively set its sights on conquering the latest artificial intelligence technology, reviving the ancient Silk Road as “the next phase of globalization,” taking the lead on climate change, and shaping the next world order in its image. If the West does not hear this wake-up call loud and clear, it is destined to somnambulate into second-class status on the world stage.

This is not, of course, to suggest in any way that the West turn toward autocracy and authoritarianism. Rather, it is to say that unless democracies look beyond the short-term horizon of the next election cycle and find ways to reach a governing consensus, they will be left in the dust by the oncoming future. If the discourse continues to deteriorate into a contest over who dominates the viral memes of the moment, and if democracy comes to mean sanctifying the splintering of society into a plethora of special interests, partisan tribes, and endless acronymic identities instead of seeking common ground, there is little hope of competing successfully with a unified juggernaut like China. Waiting for China to stumble is a foolish fallback.

Unlike the Soviet Union at the time of the Sputnik challenge in the late 1950s and early 1960s, China today possesses an economic and technological prowess the Soviet Union never remotely approached. Whether in conflict or cooperation, China will be a large presence in our future.

It is in that context that we examine the strengths and weakness of China’s system as a spur to thinking through our own challenges. To turn the old Chinese saying toward ourselves, “The stones from hills yonder can polish jade at home.”

Taking Back Control

To set the frame for rethinking democracy and the political economy, we argue that the anxiety behind the populist reaction is rooted in the uncertainties posed by the great transformations under way, from the intrusions of globalization on how sovereign communities govern their affairs, to such rapid advances in technology as social media and robotics, to the increasingly multicultural composition of all societies. Change is so enormous that individuals and communities alike feel they are drowning in the swell of seemingly anonymous forces and want to “take back control” of their lives at a scale and stride they can manage. They crave the dignity of living in a society in which their identity matters and that attends to their concerns. Effectively aligning political practices and institutions so as to confront these challenges head-on will make the difference between a world falling apart and a world coming together.

Critics of globalization argue that nation-states and communities must retrieve the capacity to make decisions that reflect their way of life and maintain the integrity of their norms and institutions, decisions the maligned cosmopolitan caste has handed over to distant trade tribunals or other global institutions managed by strangers. Those decisions, they rightly say, ought to be made through “democratic deliberation” by sovereign peoples. Yet that neat logic ignores the reality of decay and dysfunction we have already noted. Therefore, “taking back control” must, first and foremost, mean renovating democratic practices and institutions themselves.

The Politics of Renovation

The most responsible course of change in modern societies is renovation.

Renovation is the point of equilibrium between creation and destruction, whereby what is valuable is saved and what is outmoded or dysfunctional is discarded. It entails a long march through society’s institutions at a pace of change our incremental natures can absorb. Renovation shepherds the new into the old, buffering the damage of dislocation that at first outweighs longer-term benefits. In the new age of perpetual disruption, renovation is the constant of governance. Its aim is transition through evolutionary stability, within societies and in relations among nation-states and global networks.

In this book, we propose three ways to think about how to renovate democracy, the social contract, and global interconnectivity in order to take back control:

Empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system through the establishment of new mediating institutions that complement representative government
Reconfiguring the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs while spreading the wealth of digital capitalism by providing all citizens not only with the skills of the future but also with an equity share in “owning the robots.” We call this universal basic capital. The aim here is to enhance the skills and asserts of the less well-off in the first place – predistribution – as a complement to redistribution of wealth for public higher education or other public goods. The best way to fight inequality in the digital age is to spread the equity around.
Harnessing globalization through “positive nationalism,” which means an allegiance to the values of an inclusive society instead of nationalistic incantation, albeit tempered by an understanding that open societies need defined borders. It also means dialing back the hyper-globalization of “one size fits all” global trade agreements to leave room for industrial policies that compensate for the dislocations of integrated global markets. To temper the deepening rivalry, even economic decoupling underway between the US and China, we call for a “partnership of rivals” on climate action. If there is not some area of common intents, all else will dwell in the shadow of distrust and lead to a new Cold War, the breakup of the world into geopolitical blocs and worse.

These proposals, of course, do not exhaust the answers to the panoply of daunting challenges we have raised. But they do suggest ways we might think about how to change present social and political arrangements for addressing those challenges. We do not insist that we are somehow the font of all wisdom but regard our endeavor as a point of departure that deepens and expands the debate. Without concrete propositions to criticize and amend, the discourse about change is only an airy exchange that fails to move the needle.

Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels are the founders of the Berggruen Institute and the authors of Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East (2012). Their latest work, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (2019), is the first in a Berggruen Institute series on the “Great Transformations” published by the University of California Press (UC

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Sunday, July 12, 2020

Global AI collaboration to fight pandemic, revive economies

The future is AI technology

A staff member, wearing a face mask following the Covid-19 outbreak, is looking at a robot at the venue for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China. Prompted by the need to contain Covid-19, the world is now looking toward AI-based techniques to aid the anti-pandemic fight. - Reuters

SHANGHAI, July 11 (Xinhua): Due to Covid-19, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2020 in Shanghai this week adopted a hybrid model where offline exhibitions and online displays took place simultaneously to showcase the latest artificial intelligence (AI) applications and frontier development.

More than 500 AI experts and executives, including Nobel laureates and Turing Award winners, attended this year's WAIC held from Thursday to Saturday with the theme of "Intelligent Connectivity, Indivisible Community."

AI has already demonstrated its potential to transform societies, economies and industries, but this is just the beginning, according to experts at the conference. WAIC plays a critical role in bringing people together to learn from one another and identify ways of collaborating to achieve more.

AI TECHNOLOGIES FIGHT EPIDEMIC

In recent years, AI has begun to play a significant role in many sectors. Prompted by the need to contain Covid-19, people around the world are looking toward AI-based techniques to aid the anti-pandemic fight.

Companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, SenseTime and iFlytek have been among the first to join the fight. Data modelling, crowd screening, and tracing contacts of confirmed Covid-19 cases have been widely used to help control the spread of the coronavirus.

SenseTime, an AI-technology firm with its China headquarters and Global R&D headquarters in Shanghai that specializes in computer vision and deep learning, participated in this year's event.

During the outbreak of Covid-19, SenseTime collaborated with several hospitals and medical institutions across China to assist COVID-19 diagnoses. The company upgraded its diagnosis application, which dramatically improved the effectiveness, accuracy, and speed of the current analysis of CT scans with the help of AI algorithms.

Screening large crowds is another area where AI shows its potential, particularly in public spaces such as the metro. AI firm Megvii, another exhibitor at WAIC, launched a remote temperature measurement system in subway stations in Beijing to help screen out passengers with a high fever. Compared with manual detection, the system can examine up to 300 people in one minute without disrupting passenger flows.

Shen Xiangyang, a professor from Tsinghua University, said during the conference that AI technology could play a significant role in remote diagnoses, vaccine development, virus analysis and global coordination.

With the widespread application of AI products and technologies in the battle against the epidemic, Li Yong, director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, said that the technological innovation of AI should go beyond national boundaries to avoid widening the technological gap between developed and developing countries.

AI is also changing the way of scientific research and pharmaceutical manufacture in the healthcare sector.

"Health systems face incredible challenges due to aging populations, increased patient expectations, and the growing prevalence of chronic conditions. Covid-19 has only intensified those challenges," said Pascal Soriot, executive director and CEO of AstraZeneca. "If AI is to play its full part in overcoming them, I believe we need to embrace the opportunity, collaborate, and pursue it together."

NEW ENGINE FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to rising demand for online services, which at the same time created many new scenarios for AI applications. Many experts attending the WAIC saw AI as a new engine to stimulate growth in the post-coronavirus era.

Zhu Min, chairman of the National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University, was upbeat about the prospects of the AI industry. "Our lives underwent fundamental changes when we moved from offline to online activities, making teleworking, online entertainment, shopping, and conferencing part of our daily lives. This provides a broad space for AI development in the future."

China has seen a quickly evolving AI ecosystem in recent years. Many Chinese cities have stepped up efforts in building AI clusters.

Shanghai built the AIsland of the Zhangjiang Science City in the Pudong New Area, an AI cluster for both major AI players and start-ups. Covering an area of 66,000 square meters, the AIsland has attracted about 90 companies, including Microsoft and IBM.

Besides a rapidly expanding AI market, AI companies were also buoyed by a friendly policy environment. In this year's government work report, China called for support on the construction of new types of infrastructure, which is widely regarded as a positive policy signal for cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, AI, and the Internet of Things.

New infrastructure will hopefully start the trend of AI in all aspects of life in China, said Li Yanhong, CEO of Baidu, at the opening ceremony of the WAIC.

The continuous efforts in promoting the AI industry and the construction of new types of infrastructure will boost economic activities following the pandemic, experts said.

Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, was confident of the potential of the collaboration between AI and traditional industries, noting that more traditional industries ranging from manufacturing, medical care to the education sector will focus on improving efficiency in the next decade.

Right before the WAIC 2020, the Shanghai AI Tower was unveiled in the city's Xuhui District, marking another milestone of international AI cooperation.

Twenty leading global AI companies including Microsoft, Huawei, and Alibaba have clustered in the twin buildings on the waterfront along the Huangpu River.

Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, who is also co-chair of the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, underlined cross-border collaboration and the unity of mankind during a virtual speech at the opening ceremony of the conference.

"We should take responsibility instead of being worried because the virus does not need a passport or sees no national borders. Technology should also have no borders," said Ma. "We have no other choice, so the sooner we start to cooperate, unify, and embrace each other, the sooner we will win," he added. - XInhua

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Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success: Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High! Richard Tan MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM

Saturday, July 11, 2020

The fight for digital supremacy

China is at the forefront of a huge revolution in AI. Already, the United States realises it is no longer the leader.

Whenever Trump (left) is put in a corner, his tactic is to blame China! (President Xi right). The latest being his wish to distract from his Administration’s failure to contain the disease, Covid-19.

Digital Standoff: The Fight for Tech Supremacy Between ...

https://youtu.be/0u9EMl3vv2M

Venture capitalists and experts Stella Ji Xin, Wei Jiang and Rebecca Fannin discuss what’s at stake as the standoff deepens, exploring the growing list of what could go wrong as a tech war looms.

CHINA bashing has become a bipartisan passion in the West, especially the United States.

Whenever Trump is put in a corner, his tactic is to blame China!

The latest being his wish to distract from his Administration’s failure to contain the disease, Covid-19 – such that America, despite having had months to prepare for it, now has the most Covid-19 cases and deaths in the world – far, far more than China.

Where recent pandemics – including the 2014 African Ebola outbreak – saw productive Sino-American co-operation, this one has taken the already poor relations between the United States and China to new lows. As I see it, they are likely to worsen, despite some efforts on both sides to rein in the rhetoric.

Chips war

Essentially, the conflict that matters most between the United States and China is the 21st century fight over technology– from AI (artificial intelligence) to 5G (network equipment). The real battleground is in chips or SCs (semiconductors) where US industrial leadership and China’s superpower ambitions directly clash.

Firms from the United States and their allies (including South Korea and Taiwan) dominate the most advanced areas of the industry.

China, by contrast, remains reliant on the outside world for supplies of high-end chips.

It spends more on semiconductor imports than it does on oil.

As far as I know, the list of top 12 SC firms by sales does not contain a single Chinese name. Well before Trump arrived on the scene, China made plain its intention to catch up.

Not surprisingly, China’s ambitions to create a cutting-edge industry worried Trump’s predecessor.

President Obama blocked and stymied the acquisition of chipmakers by the Chinese in 2015 and 2016. Other countries are alarmed, too.

Taiwan and South Korea have policies to stop sales of domestic chips firms and to dam flows of intellectual property. Since then, Trump has intensified the chips battle.

Three things have changed. First, the United States realised its edge in technology gives it power over China. Second, China’s incentives to become self-reliant in SCs attracted its tech giants to come on board: Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei, all ploughing money into making chips. And, China has showed that it can outcompete US firms.

China is destined to try to catch up; the United States is determined to stay ahead. Third, the SC supply chain is already too globalised for US to stop it.

Today, US has the edge over China in designing and making high-end chips. It can undoubtedly slow its rival.

But China’s progress will be hard to stop. Firms like Huawei have the proven ability to innovate; it spurred China on to develop its domestic supercomputing industry.

Zhongguancun

China’s own Silicon Valley – Zhongguancun – has come of age.

Originally a byword for cheap knockoffs in the electronics market, it has since evolved into a sweeping quadrant of north-western Beijing that includes its two leading universities, Peking and Tsinghua.

Zhongguancun is now a concept as much as a place for “self-dependent innovation of high-quality” economic development, to accelerate a shift from assembling tech products to creating them.

Surrounded by the world’s largest, fastest growing market for such goods, Zhongguancun is creating new apps, services and devices more speedily and cleverly than ever before.

Total venture-capital investment pouring into Chinese technology companies has grown rapidly, now reaching parity with the United States. New companies have ready access to capital and to refreshed flows of technically-minded graduates.

Indeed, China has long since moved beyond producing merely Chinese versions of Silicon Valley companies. The newest firms in Zhongguancun employ business models that do not exist yet in the United States.

Even in areas where Silicon Valley dominates globally (like social media), Zhongguancun can compete. But Zhongguancun’s real strength is in developing new applications and services in SCs and AI for the Chinese market, to be provided through smartphones.

Chinese digital services are often the first of their kind. The Chinese government has adopted a laissez-faire approach to such companies: “If there is no regulation, they let you run.”

To address one of Zhongguancun’s greatest weakness –a reliance on imported components and technology, firms are investing to make chips which manage charging devices wirelessly, or that fuse camera data into three-dimensional scans.

It is also investing in companies that design new materials – antibacteria ones for fabrics and mattresses, and ceramics for phones.

Zhongguancun is now set to blossom as a global, not just a regional, tech hub, to insulate China against protectionism.

The priority is to nurture its own suppliers. Chinese chip companies offer software for designing circuits, and handling licensing negotiations on behalf of its young tenants with other chip architecture firms.

The latest crop of start-ups has set their sights on foreign markets. They see the trade war not as a threat, but as an opportunity – to fill the gaps in Chinese supply chains and then compete in the West.

So far, very few Chinese tech companies have managed to go global, Huawei and Bytedance being the most prominent. And Huawei, in particular, is already under threat due to security fears in the West.

AI supremacy

China is at the forefront of a huge revolution in AI. Already, the United States realises it is no longer the leader. Today, fundamental AI innovation no longer matters, since the big intellectual breakthroughs have indeed occurred.

What matters most is effective implementation, not innovation. China has many advantages: (i) work of leading AI researchers is readily available online; (ii) its ceaseless “trial and error” approach is well suited to the effective rolling out of the fruits of AI; (iii) the dense urban settlements have created a huge demand for delivery and other services; (iv) its backwardness allowed businesses to leapfrog; (v) China has scale; (vi) there is a supportive government; and (vii) the Chinese is far more relaxed about privacy.

As I see it, China is fast catching-up in SC production. It’s already ahead in potential users, but has only about half the number of AI experts and companies.

What then are we to do

Not so long ago, all Top 10 technology companies were American.

Today, four among them are Chinese, including Huawei whose revenues amounted to less than US$28bil in 2009; they reached US$107bil in 2019. Telecoms and wireless technology are at the forefront of the competitive sparring between the United States and China.

In a world where everything is dual-use technology, it is difficult to distinguish what is commercial and civilian; what is strategic and military.

To have the technological edge is existential for both nations.

5G is a big deal, both in itself and because of its multiplier effect on a range of other technologies, including autonomous vehicles, the Internet of things, smart cities, virtual reality and, battlefields.

The first movers will set global standards. That in turn brings-in billions in revenues, substantial job creation and leadership in any other technologies that require ever swifter transmission of data.

The United States is determined that China will not dominate in 5G. The country that owns 5G will own many innovations and global standards.

As I see it, the United States will not dominate. Chinese equipment is cheaper and in many cases, superior.

No question US has lost its edge. Huawei today has become a national champion of China, mainly because of its huge investments – US$180bil over the past five years and has 10 times as many base stations as the United States.

Sanctions by US against Huawei is likely only to accelerate China’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency.

To me, Western panic over Huawei is overblown. 5G will not yet profoundly alter consumers’ lives. True, it promises faster connections; but often only in optimal conditions. I know similar down-speeds can be achieved by extending 4G. Outside China, South Korea and a few other Asian countries, the uptake of 5G is likely to be slow.

Sure, 5G is more than just a faster way to stream. The extra processing oomph will allow base stations on networks’ “edge” to guide self-driving cars, or robots on factory floors.

5G will not just power telecoms but much of economic activity, making wireless networks into critical infrastructure.

Its wireless connectivity brings with it the next-generation Wi-Fi, constellations of low-orbit satellites and, soon 6G.

So, Chinese dominance of this wireless tapestry spooks many Western security hawks.

If Huawei is allowed to build even parts of these networks, it could wreak havoc in the event of a conflict between China and the West.

For all his China-bashing, Trump appears to have since demurred, instead heeding the concerns of America’s tech bosses, who warn that such a move can hurt their industry.

As I see it, the 5G race is not about out-innovating China but hobbling it. In the end, Trump faces a clear choice in doing something altogether very American: help usher in innovation that lets many companies thrive at a time when cheaper and better connectivity is precisely what a post-pandemic world really needs. But will he?

By Lin See Yan
The views expressed are the writer’s own.

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