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klrr | 7 years ago

I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological change.

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yorwba|7 years ago

It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked.

I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

kamaal|7 years ago

>>I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.

Yup. Same here in India.

People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.

Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.

nradov|7 years ago

Those students will be awfully disappointed when they graduate and discover that most commercial software development work involves just shuffling bits around with no AI in sight.

internet555|7 years ago

I could be quite wrong but wouldn’t a course in Bayesian statistics be a lot more useful for someone interested in inference or however you will say it?

seanmcdirmid|7 years ago

We’ve been here before with Japan in the 80s, and it led to an extended 2nd AI winter.

China’s efforts are much larger than Japan’s were, and they have a bigger housing bubble to go along with that to boot. It is interesting to see how history repeats itself.

wycs|7 years ago

AI actually makes money now. There will be no more AI winters as it can now support its own development without patronage.

gaius|7 years ago

AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining

Yes everyone wants to mine the data, but noone wants to generate or gather new original data in the first place.

klrr|7 years ago

I think China has plenty of data as well, of its own people at least. It's a surveillance state, and the big corps work closely with the government and so also the universities. My point is more that they have a chance of winning the ML race, but that doesn't matter if there will be more important technological breakthroughs in other areas that will have greater impact on AI than ML.

pimmen|7 years ago

China does want to gather data, it has deployed tons of sensors and cameras to monitor its population's habits on the street. With the personal credit score implemented it can monitor its population even more thoroughly. How much data it gathers on its population thanks to the Great Firewall we can only speculate.

Granted, population data is one thing since you can incentivize people to share it. Data gathering that requires investment of money into sensors and time for careful placement of them is a completely different thing entirely

MrP|7 years ago

Comment of the year

jobigoud|7 years ago

> they may lack progress in other fundamental fields

Well if they crack general intelligence maybe they can generate, copy and paste researchers in those other fundamental fields.

baybal2|7 years ago

Lack of substantial practical applications might make it a substantial waste of time and money.

Does anybody remember the 5th gen computing stuff from 30 years ago?

wycs|7 years ago

AI is general use. This is a good bet.