China Goes All-In On AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t working to optimize every part of our daily lives… yet. When AI applications do reach your home and car, it’ll be in droves. You’ll have more options than you could ever look through, just like the current state of mobile apps.

As a result of the impending cash influx from AI, most of the tech giants have included AI in their list of top three or five priorities for their 5- and 10-year plans. With China’s booming tech scene, companies (cough, Google) that previously shied away from working in China now plan to establish an AI center there.

China’s newest AI announcement comes on the heels of Google’s recent announcement about their planned AI center. The country plans to invest $2.1 billion for a dedicated technology space where researchers can focus on AI development.

Making Space for Innovation

The construction timeline is five years, and the technology park will be in western Beijing. The size of the space will be 135 acres (or over 5 million square feet) of nearly 400 businesses. These businesses, projected to create an annual revenue of nearly $7.7 billion, specialize in biometrics, high-speed big data, cloud computing, and deep learning.

The offices and its employees will get access to 5G mobile Internet, a supercomputer, and cloud services. Beijing’s working on housing AI commercialization, improving its military’s capabilities, and poising itself to become a leading smart city of the future. China already set goals to make a “major breakthrough” in AI technology by 2025 and to become a world leader in AI by 2030. The country wants to create an AI industry worth 1 trillion yuan (or $150 billion).

Some analysts aren’t worried about it, though; they claim San Francisco AI developers are more creative and more educated than their Chinese counterparts. The Beijing research park, however, will seek partnerships and collaborations with Chinese and foreign universities, research institutes, and large corporations. These will help create natural research hubs throughout the campus.

Changing Life as We Know It

China’s AI development plan aptly states, “The rapid development of artificial intelligence will profoundly change the social life of mankind and change the world,” and we couldn’t agree more. The immense responsibility to create, secure, and innovate AI applications falls on developers’ shoulders. It’s increasingly important to have a strong foundation in AI these days, no matter what area of technology you’re working on.