China is making great AI even greater

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Musical.ly was one of the most popular social media apps among young Americans in 2017, and what is more impressive is that the app is in fact developed by a Chinese company, iFlyTek, which is headquartered in Shanghai. In 2017, the young company won the Wall Street Journal’s 2017 Innovator Award.

Recognized as a dominant player in voice recognition, iFlyTek applies deep learning to speech recognition, natural-language processing, machine translation and data mining and its products can now be found almost everywhere in China.

Together with Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, iFlyTek are the four domestic tech companies which were identified by the China’s Ministry of Science and Technology as the “national team” to boost the development of AI technology in the country.

The White House released a report in 2016 indicating that China has surpassed the US in the number of publications mentioning “deep learning”, a major branch of AI. PwC predicts that AI will bring a revenue of 16 trillion US dollars by 2030 and half of the gains are likely to be in China.

In 2017, the Chinese government issued the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. The CPC Central Committee’s Political Bureau meeting also explicitly instructed the integration of AI with the real economy. China's artificial intelligence once again grabbed the world's attention.

The Financial Times predicts that China will lead the AI revolution together with the US. Some people say that AI may be the last invention of mankind, and perhaps this is why China won’t miss out on this chance.