中国挑战美国人工智能主导地位

Artificial intelligence has had more than its fair share of ups and downs over the past 60 years, but one constant feature of the field has been the dominance of the US. Significant contributions to AI have certainly arisen elsewhere but, until recently, every AI system that made worldwide news originated in the US.

过去60年人工智能经历了不寻常的跌宕起伏，但该领域的一个不变特征是，美国一直占据主导地位。其他地方当然也对人工智能做出了重大贡献，但直到不久前，每个引起全球轰动的人工智能系统全都源于美国。

DeepBlue, which defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, was an IBM system, as was Watson, which defeated champion Jeopardy players in 2011. The robot Stanley, which demonstrated the feasibility of driverless cars in 2005, was developed at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. And if you dig a little deeper, the reasons for the dominance of the US become clear: Darpa, the US military research funding agency, is acknowledged in many of the key research papers in the AI canon.

击败国际象棋特级大师加里•卡斯帕罗夫(Garry Kasparov)的“深蓝”(DeepBlue)是IBM研发的系统，在2011年《危险边缘》(Jeopardy)节目中获得冠军的“沃森”(Watson)也是一样。在2005年证明了无人驾驶汽车可行性的机器人斯坦利(Stanley)是居于硅谷中心的斯坦福大学(Stanford University)开发的。如果你再深究一下，美国占据主导地位的原因就变得很清楚了：关于人工智能标准的许多重要研究论文都鸣谢了美国军事研究资助机构——美国国防高级研究计划局(DARPA)。

But today American hegemony in AI is being seriously challenged for the first time. One of the most remarkable features of the current AI boom is the sudden and very visible presence of China as a global force.

但如今美国在人工智能方面的霸权首次受到严峻挑战。当前人工智能热潮的一个最显著特点是，中国突然崛起为耀眼的全球人工智能强国。

One crude but nevertheless useful way of measuring national scientific muscle is to look at how a country performs in the leading scientific publication venues. Historically, one of the key scientific conferences in AI is the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of AI. This was first held in 1980 and, within a few years, the conference was receiving some 5,000 delegates. The 1980 conference was dominated by the US: there was not a single paper written by researchers from a Chinese institute, and only a modest European presence.

衡量一国科学力量的一种粗糙而又有用的方法是，观察一国在重要科学出版界的表现。从历史上看，人工智能领域的一个重要科学会议是人工智能促进协会(Association for the Advancement of AI)的年会。它在1980年首次举行，几年内就有了约5000名代表参会。1980年的会议由美国主导：没有一份中国机构的研究人员撰写的论文，欧洲也只有为数不多的论文。

This is not too surprising, of course: in its early days the conference was a US-centric event, and China was a very different place back then.

当然，这并不太令人感到意外：会议在早期是以美国为中心的，而那时的中国与现在截然不同。

Go forward 18 years to the 1998 conference, and America still dominated, but with a substantial non-US presence, particularly from Europe. But there was just one paper from China — more specifically from Hong Kong, which had reverted to Chinese rule just one year before.

快进18年来到1998年的大会，美国仍然占据主导地位，但出现了许多美国以外地方的研究论文，尤其是来自欧洲的。但只有一篇论文来自中国——更具体地说来自一年前回归中国的香港。

Today, the picture is startlingly different. At the 2018 conference, held in New Orleans in February, China submitted 25 per cent more papers than the US (1,242 to 934). More tellingly, it was just three papers behind the US in acceptances.

如今情况已经截然不同。在今年2月份在新奥尔良举行的2018年大会上，中国提交的论文数量比美国多出25%(前者是1242份，后者是934份)。更具说服力的是，收录的中国论文数只比美国少了3篇。

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that China is now in serious competition with the US for dominance in AI. No European nation remotely competes at these volumes and, even taken as a whole, Europe is not really in competition for gold or silver.

人们很难不得出一个结论，即中国现在正处于与美国争夺人工智能领域主导地位的激烈竞争之中。没有一个欧洲国家能在这种规模上参与竞争，即使作为整体，欧洲实际上也不具备争夺金牌或者银牌的实力。

So why is China suddenly so prominent? In a word: scale. The machine-learning techniques behind the current AI boom are seriously data hungry. To recognise human faces, translate languages and pilot driverless cars requires huge quantities of “training data” — the fuel for machine learning algorithms that we generate every time we go online or use our smartphones.

那么为什么中国突然如此突出? 一句话：规模。当前人工智能热潮背后的机器学习技术对数据极其依赖。识别人脸、翻译语言和试验无人驾驶汽车需要大量的“训练数据”——这是我们每次上网或使用智能手机时产生的供机器学习算法使用的燃料。

With a population in a single market larger than the US and Europe combined, Chinese companies have a natural advantage in terms of access to data. While they might not be familiar to ordinary consumers in the west, Chinese tech companies like Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and JD.com are global giants in terms of the number of users and market capitalisation. And they are all investing in AI on a dizzying scale. Ask a British teenager if they know WeChat, Tencent’s social media app, and you will be met by blank looks (I know because I’ve tried); but in China, the app has nearly a billion users.

由于中国的人口数量比美国和欧洲的总和还多，因此中国企业在获取数据方面具有天然的优势。虽然西方普通消费者可能不熟悉腾讯(Tencent)、百度(Baidu)、阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和京东(JD.com)等中国科技公司，但从用户数量和市值方面来说，这些公司都是全球巨头。它们全都以惊人的规模大举投资于人工智能。如果你问一个英国少年，他们是否知道腾讯的社交媒体应用微信(WeChat)，他们会一脸茫然(我之所以知道是因为我这么问过)，但在中国，微信拥有近10亿用户。

One face of China’s AI revolution is Andrew Ng. British born to parents from Hong Kong, Mr Ng was director of the AI lab at Stanford, one of the great historical centres for US AI research. He made his name developing AI software to control helicopters, and won the Computers and Thought Award, the key research award for young AI scientists.

中国人工智能革命的代表人物之一是吴恩达(Andrew Ng)。吴恩达出生于英国，父母是香港人，他是斯坦福大学人工智能实验室的主任，这是美国人工智能研究领域历史悠久的几大中心之一。他因开发人工智能软件来控制直升机而闻名，并赢得了奖励年轻人工智能科学家的重要研究奖——计算机与思想奖(Computers and Thought Award)。

He went on to work for Google, starting the Google brain project, and then became chief scientist for Baidu. Last year, he left Baidu to pursue other ventures. Brilliant, charismatic, and above all, remarkably energetic, Mr Ng has a flair for highly quotable soundbites. He recently tweeted: “Pretty much anything that a normal person can do in less than a second, we can now automate with AI.” I am not inclined to argue.

他后来去了谷歌(Google)，启动了谷歌大脑项目，然后又成为百度的首席科学家。去年，他离开百度去追求其他事业。吴恩达聪明、富有魅力，而且最重要的是精力特别充沛。吴恩达有着能够说出被人们广泛引用的金句的天赋。他最近在Twitter上表示：“一个普通人可以在不到一秒的时间内做的几乎所有事情，现在我们差不多都可以使用人工智能自动化。”我不想争论。

In 2017, he declared that AI is the “new electricity”, and that “just as electricity transformed many industries roughly 100 years ago, AI will also now change nearly every major industry”. If that is the case, it is very likely that China will be the generator that powers AI in the decades ahead.

2017年，他宣称人工智能是“新电力”，而且“就像电力在大约100年前改变了许多行业一样，人工智能现在也将会改变几乎所有主要行业”。如果真是这样的话，中国很有可能会成为未来几十年人工智能的发电机。

The writer is professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and author of ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Ladybird Expert Book’

本文作者是牛津大学(University of Oxford)计算机科学教授，并著有《人工智能：瓢虫专家手册》(Artificial Intelligence: A Ladybird Expert Book)一书