The 2019 World Economic Forum will open on January 22 in Davos, Switzerland. Innovation is expected to be one of the major topics at this year's  World Economic Forum, and also the most important strength of any economy.

Despite the hype over Artificial Intelligence (AI), machines still can't think like humans. In the last few years they have become capable of learning. Our devices have opened their eyes and ears, and cars have taken the wheel. Today humanity is accelerating into a future that few can predict.

That is the reason why so many people are desperate to meet Dr. Kai-fu Lee, who has made public his ties to AI in his book, AI Superpowers. Well known as a venture capitalist and a technology executive, Lee started his exploration with AI decades ago as a PhD student when he developed the world's first speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. Is the future of AI as tempting as we have been told? We reveal if we are on the verge of an AI arms race?

AI is a very pragmatic technology, that is just a tool to help us within one given domain to do things better. So it is a tool, not going to be a utopia or dystopia, said the tech visionary Kai-fu Lee, the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, in an exclusive interview with CGTN on the eve of the 2019 World Economic Forum.

He advocates to be rational about AI: "I think people who are talking about utopian vision, liking AI totally helps everybody and no job will be lost, I think they are either very naive or saying so, because they don't want any negative PR for their companies. Over time, they will be proved wrong. And then people have been arguing AI will be so powerful, even maybe control us, they just watched too much science fiction."

"AI is like big black box within one domain when you present lots of data, it can learn to optimize objective functions," Dr. Lee explains carefully about the definition of AI, "Essentially it is improving one level at a time of lots of human capabilities. But it is limited in one domain. You can't teach a face recognizer to instantly become capable of making loans in banks."

Dr. Lee also attends the forum of this year. When it comes to the crucial message that leaders around the world to deliver this time, he brings about two aspects of understanding. 

First of all, it is important to bring Chinese voice into that collective thinking. There are many global institutions looking at AI, but China has largely been excluded. Second, he likes to raise the awareness about the inner quality issues, about other challenges AI brings forwards, and also find ways that people could share ideas. At the same time, we should not be forcing everyone to the exactly the same culture and value system.

With the theme of "globalization 4.0", leaders are encouraged to reflect on the future of globalization. Dr. Lee believes it means serious sense of global responsibility for strong countries, "they should worry about countries that are weak, because the gap of strong-weak will become larger and larger. For companies and countries that possess technology, they should think about how to share that, as a pose to zero-sum game globally."