The Present Situation of the Development of Artificial Intelligence in China

The development status of AI in China: There is still a big gap between the overall level of leading technology and developed countries.

Global AI is still in the early stage of development, and AI has risen to the level of national strategy. According to the development status of AI in China, many technologies are in the leading position in the world, and innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming more and more active. However, there is still a big gap between the overall level and that of developed countries.

At the beginning of the new year, let's turn our attention to artificial intelligence. In the past 2017, the improvement of hardware and algorithm in basic research field and the application of technology combined with industrial development make the development of artificial intelligence come to another climax. "Machines can think and act like human beings" expands the boundaries of the imagination of society as a whole.

The report of the Nineteenth National Congress put forward the idea of "promoting the deep integration of Internet, big data, artificial intelligence and real economy". At present, at what stage is the development level of AI in China, and what is the progress of its application in the field of industry? This edition has planned a series of reports focusing on high-quality development and artificial intelligence. From the perspective of industry experts, senior practitioners and ordinary consumers, it will show readers a comprehensive picture of the rapid development of artificial intelligence in China.

The development status of AI in China: There is still a big gap between the overall level of leading technology and developed countries.

2017 is the key year for the development of artificial intelligence in China. Whether in the Report on the Work of the Government or the Report of the Nineteenth National Congress in October, AI has been clearly put forward as a development content, which means that AI has risen to the level of national strategy.

Subsequently, the introduction of a series of policy plans, such as the New Generation AI Development Plan and the Three-year Action Plan for Promoting the Development of the New Generation AI Industry (2018-2020), has given the AI development a clear timetable and road map.

Nowadays, the field of artificial intelligence in China is making great efforts in two aspects: top-level design and implementation, seizing the opportunity, preparing for development, and starting a new round of sprint.

Global Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy

What is artificial intelligence?

In 1956, at a special summer talk at Dartmouth College, Professor John McCarthy of MIT first proposed the concept of artificial intelligence. Since then, artificial intelligence has quickly become a hot topic.

Although there are many definitions of concepts, the scientific community has reached a consensus on the basic ideas and contents of AI: to study the laws of human intelligence activities, so as to allow machines to simulate, to enable them to have learning ability, and even to think and work like human beings.

In the early days of AI research, some scientists were very optimistic that with the popularity of computers and the improvement of CPU computing power, the realization of AI is just around the corner. However, it has been proved that the development of AI is not as good as expected.

From 1950s to 1970s, AI tried to simulate human wisdom, but the upsurge gradually cooled down due to the limitation of too simple algorithms, lack of theory and computing ability to cope with uncertain environments. In 1980s, rule-based expert system, the key application of AI, was developed, but with less data, it was difficult to capture experts'tacit knowledge. Knowledge, coupled with limited computing power, makes it neglected, and artificial intelligence research has entered a low ebb.

Until the 1990s, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence algorithms such as neural networks, in-depth learning and information and communication technologies such as big data, cloud computing and high-performance computing, artificial intelligence has ushered in the spring.

"About 10 years ago, a new machine learning method called deep learning made AI algorithms smarter." Yi Jianqiang, a researcher at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "It is an algorithm for modeling complex relationships between data through multi-level representation. Deep learning imitates the structure of human brain, has stronger ability of modeling and reasoning, and can solve many kinds of complex intelligent problems more effectively.

Tan Tieniu, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "At present, special AI technology for specific fields has made breakthroughs, and can even surpass human intelligence in single point breakthroughs and single tests of local intelligence level."

Among them, the more famous events include the 1997 "Deep Blue" victory over the world chess champion, the 2011 IBM supercomputer Watson victory over two human champions in the American TV Answer Program, and the 2016 and 2017 Alpha Dog victory over the human Go master.

In the view of many AI experts, although AI has made great progress after nearly 60 years of development, it is still in the early stage of development on the whole.

China's many technologies are in the leading position in the world

In the interview, many insiders believed that although AI technology research and industrial application started late in China, with the support and encouragement of a number of national policies and research funds, AI technology has developed rapidly in recent years.

In terms of basic research, our country has a team of research and development of artificial intelligence and state key laboratories and other well-equipped research and development institutions, and has established a variety of research topics related to artificial intelligence. The quantity and quality of research and development output has also been greatly improved, and many outstanding achievements have been achieved.

Qin Yong, Director of the High-tech Department of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said: "Our country is in the leading position in the world in speech recognition, visual recognition, machine translation, Chinese information processing and other technologies. Tan Tieniu, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made a breakthrough in imaging devices, image processing and features in the field of iris recognition.

Please read the Chinese version for details.