Google shrugs off trade war at Shanghai AI event, says partnering with China on talent ecosystem is key
Themed as “AI for Everyone”, the Shanghai forum touched on Google’s artificial intelligence research and applications in areas such as health care, astronomy and arts
Art & Culture, a seemingly harmless free app from Google that allows users to view interesting art and exhibits online across the world, remains banned in China because of the Great Firewall.
But this small fact, which can be seen as a symbol of the US technology giant’s wider problems over censorship and an escalating trade and technology war between the US and China, has not deterred Google from continuing to engage the world’s second-biggest economy.
Jay Yagnik, Google’s head of machine perception research, was in Shanghai last week for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), where discussions covered cool but not necessarily new AI applications to an audience unfamiliar with Google’s offerings, such as real-time menu translation through to smartphone tech that could search and identify a dog breed automatically from a photo.
“We have got a very, very engaged community in China,” said Yagnik, noting the two million downloads of Google’s open-source machine learning software tool TensorFlow by developers in the country. “Partnering with China and the overall AI talent ecosystem is really important.”
Betting big on the core technology behind an array of cutting-edge applications from autonomous driving to facial recognition, China’s State Council last July laid out a three-step road map to AI supremacy. It included the goals of building a domestic AI industry worth about US$150 billion and to make the country an “innovation centre for AI” by 2030. China’s AI ambitions have captured the attention of US President Donald Trump in his escalating trade spat with the country.
