Horizon is often seen as potentially becoming China’s equivalent of NVIDIA. The company is founded by Dr Kai Yu, a prominent industry figure with quite the credentials.

Yu led Baidu’s AI Research lab for three years, founded the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning, and launched the company’s autonomous driving business unit.

Furthermore, Yu has taught at Stanford University, published over 60 papers, and even won first place in the ImageNet challenge which evaluates algorithms for object detection and image classification.

China is yet to produce a chipset firm which can match the capabilities of Western equivalents.

With increasing US sanctions making it more difficult for Chinese firms to access American semiconductors, a number of homegrown companies are emerging and gaining attention from investors.

Horizon is just five-years-old and specialises in making AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles. The company has already attracted significant funding.

Around two years ago, Horizon completed a $600 million funding round with a $3 billion valuation. The company has secured $150 million so far as part of this latest round.

While it’s likely the incoming Biden administration in the US will take a less strict approach to trade with China, it seems Beijing wants to build more homegrown alternatives which can match or surpass Western counterparts.

Chinese tech giants like Huawei are investing significant resources in their chip manufacturing capabilities to ensure the country has the tech it needs to power groundbreaking advancements like self-driving cars.

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This year, Baidu’s stock price has dropped 36 percent. Li used the Game of Thrones phrase that “winter is coming” following a first-quarter loss.

Baidu has since not only been asking employees to fly economy rather than business, and not to stay in five-star hotels, but even to reduce the number of paper towels and cups they’re using in the office.

AI is expected to open up new revenue avenues for Baidu amid slowing growth in its traditional search business. Li said he’s an “optimist” when it comes to AI’s ability to make lives better.

Li was speaking at the plenary session of the sixth World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, east China’s Zhejiang province.

During the conference, Li made a rather bold prediction:

“Artificial intelligence will not destroy human beings but will give people eternal life. Everything every person has said and done, even people’s memories, emotions and consciousness, can be digitally stored on network disks or the cloud.

Machines can learn people’s way of thinking. When there are new problems, people can talk to future generations across time and space via technology.”

Baidu, or any other company, is likely some way off from achieving Li’s prediction – but it’s a fascinating insight about AI’s potential direction from a tech leader nonetheless.

Self-driving cars, particularly robotaxis, is one area where Baidu is investing heavily. Last month, the company launched public trials in the Hunan province consisting of 45 autonomous taxis.

Li highlights that self-driving vehicles don’t just provide an opportunity itself but also has a knock-on effect of requiring “urban transport infrastructure, especially the software, to be updated.”

Baidu is also expanding its influence and sharing its AI expertise globally.

In July, AI News reported that Baidu will help develop Intel’s Nervana neural processor. The increasing scrutiny from the US over Chinese influence in Western companies and infrastructure, leading to an increasing number of Chinese firms being added to an ‘entity list’, may reduce such collaborations.

China’s growth and influence is hard to ignore, especially in AI. China’s State Council released a roadmap two years ago aimed at making the country a global AI leader by 2030 as it ramps up competition with the US.

With the full backing of the Chinese government, it’s understandable why Li continues to be bullish about Baidu’s AI investments.

(Image Credit: Fortune Global Forum 2013 by Stefen Chow/Fortune Global Forum under CC BY-ND 2.0 license)

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28 Chinese firms have been added (PDF) to the “entity list” of the US government which prohibits American companies from continuing any links with them.

The US government said the firms were blacklisted for playing a role in the “implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in the Xinjiang province.

Rights groups accuse Beijing of persecuting the mostly Muslim Uighurs in detention camps. China is calling the camps ‘vocational training centres’ designed to combat extremism. As of last year, more than two million Uyghurs and Muslim minorities have been thrown into the camps, made to memorise Communist Party propaganda, and even renounce their religion.

The companies added to the US’ list include some notable firms such as Hikvision and Dahua Technology, two of the world’s largest suppliers of video surveillance technologies. Both of the companies have global R&D centres including in cities like London and Montreal.

However, the biggest addition to the list is SenseTime. The company is the world’s most-funded AI startup and is renowned for powerful facial recognition systems which are used by the Chinese government for mass surveillance.

SenseTime’s Viper system aims to process and analyse over 100,000 simultaneous real-time streams from traffic cameras, ATMs, and more to automatically tag and keep track of individuals.

While a mass surveillance system on such a scale has naturally gained the attention of civil rights campaigners, SenseTime itself has been vocal about the need for facial recognition standards to be established for a ‘healthier’ industry.

China is undoubtedly a pioneer in AI, partly due to its large-scale data collection providing large sets for training algorithms. The US may also be limiting some of its own companies by severing trade relations with some of China’s tech companies, but many will welcome the added pressure it places on Beijing to improve their human rights record.

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All of the students are under 18 and were picked from a list of 5,000 candidates by the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT).

Beyond academic prowess, the BIT sought other qualities in the candidates.

“We are looking for qualities such as creative thinking, willingness to fight, a persistence when facing challenges,” a BIT professor told the South China Morning Post.

The recruitment of students from such a young age marks a new point in the race to weaponise AI, primarily led by the US and China.

Students on the ‘Experimental Program for Intelligent Weapons Systems’ course will be mentored by two senior weapons scientists.

Following their first semester, the students will be asked to choose a speciality field in order to be assigned to a relevant defence laboratory for hands-on experience.

The course is four years long and students will be expected to progress onto a PhD at the university to lead China’s AI weapons initiatives.

Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasised his country will be putting a much greater focus on military AI research.

AI News reported back in July that China is planning for a new era of sea power with unmanned AI-powered submarines. The country hopes to have them operational by the early 2020s to patrol areas home to disputed military bases.

“The AI has no soul. It is perfect for this kind of job,” said Lin Yang, Chief Scientist on the project. “[An AI sub] can be instructed to take down a nuclear-powered submarine or other high-value targets. It can even perform a kamikaze strike.”

Of particular concern is that China’s subs are being designed not to seek input during the course of a mission. The international norm being promoted by AI researchers is that any weaponised AI system ultimately requires human input to make decisions.

If China is prepared to fully automate their submarines, it’s likely they’re willing to do so for other weapons systems.

There’s the infamous story of Soviet Officer Stanislav Petrov who decided not to launch the country’s nuclear warheads after a computer glitch made it appear like that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.

Human instinct averted a nuclear disaster that day.

“We are wiser than the computers,” Petrov said in a 2010 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “We created them.”

Had it been an AI instead of Petrov making the decision in 1983, the outcome would likely have been very different. China’s apparent willingness to fully automate weapons should be a concern to us all.

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SenseTime is among China’s most renowned AI companies. Back in April, we reported it had become the world’s most funded AI startup.

Part of the company’s monumental success is the popularity of facial recognition in China where it’s used in many aspects of citizens’ lives. Just yesterday, game developer Tencent announced it’s testing facial recognition to check users’ ages.

Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, says immigration officials doubted the accuracy of facial recognition technology when he first introduced his own. “We knew about it 20 years ago and, combined with fingerprint checks, the accuracy is only 53 per cent,” one told him.

Facial recognition has come a long way since 20 years ago. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to even greater leaps, resulting in companies such as SenseTime.

To dispel the idea that facial recognition is still inaccurate, Li wants ‘trust levels’ to be established.

“With standards, technology adopters can better understand the risk involved, just like credit worthiness for individuals and companies,” Xu said to South China Morning Post. “Providers of facial recognition can be assigned different trust levels, ranging from financial security at the top to entertainment uses.”

Many of the leading facial recognition technologies have their own built-in trust levels. These levels determine how certain the software must be to call it a match.

Back in July, AI News reported on the findings of ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) which found Amazon’s facial recognition AI erroneously labelled those with darker skin colours as criminals more often when matching against mugshots.

Amazon claims the ACLU left the facial recognition service’s default confidence setting of 80 percent on – when it suggests 95 percent or higher for law enforcement.

Responding to the ACLU’s findings, Dr Matt Wood, GM of Deep Learning and AI at Amazon Web Services, also called for regulations. However, Wood asks the government to force a minimum confidence level for the use of facial recognition in law enforcement.

Li and Wood may be calling for different regulations, but they – and many other AI leaders – agree that some are essential to ensure a healthy industry.

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The company says the development represents a “major milestone” and was achieved by regularly feeding the AI with news stories often used across the AI industry for testing purposes.

Microsoft claims its AI translated the articles to the same level as two human bilingual translators.

The researchers aimed to replicate the ‘trial and error’ approach to how humans learn. With this in mind, the AI translated around 2,000 sentences from Chinese to English, and then back to Chinese to understand whether it was still logical.

A technique called ‘deliberation’ was then implemented to enable the AI to edit its translations, as a human translator would, to make the most sense. The AI compares translations by reading both from left to right, and right to left.

While it’s Google Translate which dominates the field in terms of usage, Microsoft Translate has been steadily improving. These latest advancements are yet to be rolled out to consumers, but will offer users a significant upgrade once it does.

“We’re working to bring this to production as soon as possible, but we have nothing to announce at this time,” said a company spokesperson. “In the future, these systems could be applied to Microsoft’s commercially available translation tools such as Microsoft Translator, which is available as an app, API, and also the translation engine for many Microsoft products including Office, Bing and others.”

The new translation system can be tested here. Microsoft has also made the research paper which details how it achieved human parity on Chinese-English translation available.

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