The Wall Street Journal has a good article today on the race for AI dominance and it has some surprising observations from Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, and Tsuhan Chen, and a deputy president at the National University of Singapore. The interviews were done separately and put together.
Surprisingly, it looks like the experts agree that the US is in the lead in AI, though both have that academic qualifier "for now". Things change.
Part of the rise of China in AI is ready sources of data, especially in medical data, privacy data and biometrics on a large scale. The US could not do what the Chinese have been able to do by ignoring privacy and collecting all kinds of data on people, their patters of life, and how they interact. That data would be less available in the US.
I have often commented on the foreign businesses that operate in China and cooperate in the gathering of data and the censorship of products and services that are connected to those people. They allow themselves to believe that this is "just business" and that they can cooperate with China on the overwatch of their people, no matter how intrusive it might be. In some cases it is more than just China, but China stands out because of the number of people who are potential customers. It has some of the elements of the cooperation of industries with Nazi Germany or Japan prior to World War II. Where is the line between "just business" and the cooperation with tyrants who don't have compliance with international norms? Perhaps AI will sort that out, but somehow that doesn't seem possible.
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