Libro tremendamente clarificador sobre el futuro que se viene con AI. Muy bien explicado y fácil de leer. Por supuesto que es el punto de vista del autor, pero la dirección general esperable para el futuro parece muy imparable. Lo que es más subjetivo es la velocidad a la que pueda suceder o la velocidad relativa en diferentes sectores, pero es absurdo esperar cifras contundentes sobre el futuro, y más sobre un futuro que tendrá muchas cosas que todavía ni intuimos. Kai-Fu Lee hace un muy buen trabajo. Pero distinguiría dos partes del libro: una hasta el capitulo 7 y otra desde este. El capítulo 7 explica el cáncer por el que pasó el autor y que le cambió la vida. Antes de ese capítulo es todo lo que uno espera sobre el título del libro y es 200% satisfactorio. Desde el capítulo 7 Kai-Fu se vuelve sensible y humano. Valora las relaciones personales y la responsabilidad. Hace un intento de buscar soluciones al terremoto catastrófico que se ve venir en el empleo mundial. Toda esta segunda parte es buena para la reflexión, pero sin duda el autor no es tan autoridad en estos temas como en los de AI. Eso no quita nada de mérito a toda la primera parte del libro. Ya habrá más gente que busque soluciones creativas a lo que inevitablemente llegará.

Libro importante para entender el futuro. También para tomar decisiones de inversión.

Un buen libro para entender la revolución tecnolñogica que representa la Inteligencia Artificial.Además de una gran cantidad de datos contiene ideas, lo que es más importante.

Una visión completa desde una perspectiva muy interesante. Resume bien donde estamos, como hemos llegado aquí y los distintos matices culturales, y hace un buen ejercicio de hacia dónde vamos y los efectos socioeconómicos del desarrollo de la IA.

Recomendable.

An excellent book that shines the light on the future of AI and how it will play a role in the future of mankind. Totally recommend it.

Una muy buena explicación de las posibilidades reales de la IA, de los retos que va a suponer esta transformación y de las ventajas de China comparadas con las de los Estados Unidos. China tiene más datos, emprendedores más competitivos y el soporte del gobierno, aunque Estados Unidos lleva ventaja en la investigación fundamental y en las implementaciones empresariales por tener las empresas americanas una mejor base de datos interna.

Un libro interesante 2018 pero totalmente obsoleto a día de hoy. La parte que cubre la evolución vital del autor me sobra totalmente, no tiene nada que ver con IA, ni con las dinámicas entre China y US.

Un libro a tener en cuenta para tener perspectiva sobre la inteligencia artificial y lo que va a suponer en nuestras vidas. Kay-Fu Lee explica los condicionantes de China y Sillicon Valley para estar liderando el desarrollo de IA en estos momentos y cómo ve él hacia dónde podemos ir (tanto cómo optimista y pesimista).

Recomendable.

On the one hand, a history lesson on the evolution of technology in China, essential to understand its current position regarding A.I. then possible ways for the A.I. allows us to take more care of ourselves and our environment, with lo ve.

THANKS Kay Fu Lee for you book.

One of the best books ever read. I learned so many things through this book. At first, the author explains with ease the key difference between USA and China approach, it's really fascinating the depth of knowledge and details put in this book.

That said, I must agree with Lee Kai-Fu that Capital Venture made the difference, and pushed nation's amoung others to give birth to a new kind of investors, or should I call them serious/sharp investors, battle tested and experienced. It is thanks to them that IA in the first place took unprecedent large scale domination. It became like a race, a contamination in the modern world.

Not to forget the part, where the author, explains the importance of personal life and family. Bieng consumed by his work, as time goes on, with a sole goal, work and nothing else, he seems to be more of machine than a human. Which triggered an inner doubt that became at a final stage more of a conviction.

I have spent a lot of time in China until end of 2010 but have got a bit out of touch recently and hae little clue about AI. As a novice on AI, I wanted to get up to speed on the basics of it and what we need to be thinking about over the next few years. Kai-fu Lee, with his unique perspectives on AI given his academic background and professional experience in the US and China, has written a most informative and engaging book that has enlightened me on the history of AI, the key players today and their key drivers as well as his own very personal thoughts and recommendations for the future so that we get humans doing what humans do best and machines doing what machines do best. A must read.

Kai-Fu Lee has penned an absolute gem of a book! He makes a thoughtful and evidence-based argument, successfully, in my view, that China is going to win the AI race. This argument is the crux of this book, and he looks at several facets and provides excellent reasoning and examples to make his point.

According to Kai-Fu, China will win the AI race due to the following reasons:

1. Access to an enormous volume of quality data (growth expected to surpass 10x that of the USA and Europe combined)

2. A cutthroat entrepreneurial environment, where only the best of best can survive - akin to gladiators in a coliseum

3. Increasing access to highly skilled AI experts

4. Government sponsorship at the highest levels wanting to make China the leader in this space

Data is the fuel driving development of the AI landscape. The more quality data you can feed a model, the better it gets. The extraordinary adoption of "super-apps", such as WeChat and Alipay, has resulted in skyrocketing data volumes in China. These super apps are vertically integrated (app within an app without downloading separate apps) and a "one-stop-shop" for anything you need. The secret ingredient in these apps is native mobile payments making it easy for people to adopt these apps. You can only imagine the quality of data you can extract from such a platform.

Kai-Fu acknowledges that traditionally China has been a "copycat" but warns in the same vein that it's no longer the case due to its gladiator-like entrepreneurial ecosystem. This attribution is what intrigued me the most while reading the book. Kai-Fu explains how this ecosystem has evolved from a bunch of copycats to innovators - Tiktok came from China, and we don't have a super-app like WeChat in the West. He calls the entrepreneurs gladiators because that's precisely how they operate in China. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are typically mission-driven, but Chinese entrepreneurs are money-driven and will do whatever it takes to win. You can't survive in China if you don't have a business model that can scale. This hunger has driven the development of apps/platforms and business models catering to billions of people's needs.

He makes a good case for why American firms do not survive in China - they won't customise platforms to suit the local population's needs and are very slow to move. Google, Uber, Amazon have all left China. When you have businesses like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and Bytedance with valuations that eclipse some Western companies, it's hard to ignore that might and power they wheel around the globe.

When it comes to AI talent, he agrees that the USA and Canada have a great pool. Still, he also highlights that there is enormous collaboration within the AI community, and the amount of research papers published by Chinese scientists has increased significantly. Furthermore, universities are running AI degrees for students, and that population is increasing.

Finally, the most important factor - support from government or the "Party". The government has developed a specific AI strategy and is throwing money at it like there is no tomorrow. New zones are being created to host AI startups, labs etc. There is absolutely no shortage of incentives for businesses to give it a go. He argues that the government is happy for people to flourish in the "private sector".

This strength that he highlights is also the most significant risk for China to win this AI war. Since this book came out, a few things have changed. The government has put Jack Ma under house arrest (not officially but I can't see another way to look at it). They have stopped the IPO of Ant Financial and recently started clamping down on Tencent too.

The bottom line is that no one company/individual is more significant than the Party, and they will be put back in line if they try anything foolish. This approach, where the Party will conflict with communist values vs. capitalism, is where the west will excel in the long term.

Overall, it's a fascinating read and I would highly recommend this book to anyone trying to understand China's rise in the AI domain.

Het boek wordt verkocht als nieuw maar is duidelijk tweedehands, gebruikerssporen, beschadigingen en een parfum lucht.

Venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee is the former president of Google China, so is uniquely qualified to contextualize and comment on the AI competition between the United States and China. He describes how China was late to wake up to the world-transforming importance of AI:

“But where was China in all this? The truth is, the story of the birth of deep learning took place almost entirely in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The great majority of China’s technology community didn’t properly wake up to the deep-learning revolution until its Sputnik Moment in 2016…

During the age of AI discovery, progress was driven by a handful of elite thinkers, virtually all of whom were clustered in the United States and Canada…” Indeed, the number 1 textbook on artificial intelligence, “Deep Learning” is co-written by University of Montreal professors Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, and Bloomberg’s video “The Rise of AI” explains how Canada became an AI superpower.

“Of the hundreds of companies pouring resources into AI research, seven have emerged as the new giants of corporate AI research – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These Seven Giants have, in effect, morphed into what nations were fifty years ago – that is, large and relatively closed-off systems that concentrate talent and resources on breakthroughs that will mostly remain “in house.”…

If the next deep learning revolution is destined to be discovered in the corporate world, Google has the best shot at it. Among the Seven AI Giants, Google – more precisely, its parent company, Alphabet, which owns DeepMind and its self-driving subsidiary Waymo – stands head and shoulders above the rest. In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government. U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R&D budget…

The headquarters of my venture-capital fund is located in Zhongguancun (pronounced “jong-gwan-soon”) neighborhood, an area often referred to as “the Silicon Valley of China.” Today, Zhongguancun is the beating heart of China’s AI movement. To people here, the AI AlphaGo’s victories over human Go champions were both a challenge and an inspiration. They turned into China’s “Sputnik Moment” for artificial intelligence…

AlphaGo scored its first high-profile victory in March 2016 during a five-game series against the legendary Korean player Lee Sedol, winning four to one. While barely noticed by most Americans, the five games drew more than 280 million Chinese viewers. Overnight, China plunged into an artificial intelligence fever…

AlphaGo runs on deep learning, a ground-breaking approach to artificial intelligence that has turbocharged the cognitive capabilities of machines. Deep-learning-based programs can now do a better job than humans at identifying faces, recognizing speech, and issuing loans. For decades, the artificial intelligence revolution always looked to be five years away. But with the development of deep learning over the past few years, that revolution has finally arrived. It will usher in an era of massive productivity increases but also widespread disruptions in labor markets – and profound socio-psychological effects on people – as artificial intelligence takes over human jobs in all sorts of industries...

During the Ke Jie match, it wasn’t the AI-driven killer robots some prominent technologists warn of that frightened me. It was the real-world demons that could be conjured up by mass unemployment and the resulting social turmoil. The threat to jobs is coming far faster than most experts anticipated, and it will not discriminate by the color of one’s collar, instead striking the highly trained and poorly educated alike,,,

The AI world order inequality will not be contained within national borders. China and the United States have already jumped out to an enormous lead over all the other countries in artificial intelligence, setting the stage for a new kind of bipolar world order. Several other countries – the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, to name a few – have strong AI research labs staffed with great talent, but they lack the venture-capital ecosystem and large user bases to generate the data that will be key in the age of implementation that follows the age of discovery.” (cf. the Silicon Valley 150, and CB Insights Complete List of Unicorn Companies)

“Whatever gaps exist between China and the United States, those differences will pale in comparison between these two AI superpowers and the rest of the world. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs love to describe their products as “democratizing access,” “connecting people,” and, of course, “making the world a better place.” That vision of technology as a cure-all for global inequality has always been somewhat of a wistful mirage, but in the age of AI it could turn into something far more dangerous. If left unchecked, AI will dramatically exacerbate inequality on both international and domestic levels…

The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality…”

Indeed, in his book on AI, “Life 3.0”, MIT professor Max Tegmark illustrates the rising tide of occupations that AIs can accomplish better than humans, which could soon be almost all occupations. And in his book “Cultural Evolution”, World Values Survey lead researcher Ronald Inglehart describes how we are already entering a world of AI-accelerated inequality.

“Silicon Valley’s and China’s internet ecosystems grew out of very different cultural soil. Entrepreneurs in the valley are often the children of successful professionals, such as computer scientists, dentists, engineers and academics. Most Chinese tech entrepreneurs are at most one generation away from grinding poverty that stretches back centuries. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective…”

The fact that AI development in China is motivated first and foremost by materialist values of making money, is of concern to those with postmaterialist values, such as protecting human rights (cf. “Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China”, New York Times, August 16, 2018).

According to the 2018 Freedom House Ranking, the countries with the greatest respect for human rights are 1. (TIE) Finland, Norway and Sweden 2. (TIE) Canada and Netherlands 3. (TIE) Australia, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Uruguay 4. Denmark. And Canada’s respect for human rights is now attracting AI talent from around the world (cf. “A Trump Dividend for Canada? Maybe in its AI Industry”, New York Times, May 9, 2017). This means that for now at least, Canada is still an AI superpower, a position Prime Minister Trudeau is keen to defend.

“Some predict that with the dawn of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), machines that can improve themselves will trigger runaway growth in computer intelligence. Often called “the singularity,” or artificial superintelligence, this future involves computers whose ability to understand and manipulate the world dwarfs our own, comparable to the intelligence between human beings and, say, insects.

DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis predicts that the creation of superintelligence will allow human civilization to solve intractable problems, producing inconceivably brilliant solutions to global warming and previously incurable diseases.

Not everyone, however, is so optimistic. Elon Musk has called superintelligence “the biggest risk we face as a civilization,” comparing the creation of it to “summoning the demon.” Intellectual celebrities such as the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking have joined Musk in the dystopian camp, many of them inspired by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence.”

For his part in “Life 3.0” MIT professor Max Tegmark writes:

“Suppose a bunch of ants create you to be a recursively self-improving robot, much smarter than them, who shares their goals and helps build bigger and better anthills, and that you eventually attain the human-level intelligence and understanding that you have now. Do you think you’ll spend the rest of your days just optimizing anthills, or do you think you might develop a taste for more sophisticated questions and pursuits that the ants have no ability to comprehend? If so, do you think you’ll find a way to override the ant-protection urge that your formicine creators endowed you with, in much the same way that the real you overrides some of the urges your genes have given you? And in that case, might a superintelligent friendly AI find our current human goals as uninspiring and vapid as you find those of the ants, and evolve new goals different from those it learned and adopted from us?

Perhaps there’s a way of designing a self-improving AI that’s guaranteed to retain human-friendly goals forever, but I think it’s fair to say that we don’t yet know how to build one – or even whether it’s possible.”

Overall, AI Superpowers is an entertaining and informative read. Recommended!