AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

Neural networks require large amounts of two things: computing power and data. The data “trains” the program to recognize patterns by giving it many examples, and the computing power lets the program parse those examples at high speeds.

Chinese chip startups like Horizon Robotics, Bitmain, and Cambricon Technologies are flush with investment capital and working on products tailor-made for self-driving cars or other AI use-cases. The country’s edge in data will also feed into chip development, offering hardware makers a feast of examples on which to test their products.

I call these new blended environments OMO: online-merge-offline. OMO is the next step in an evolution that already took us from pure e-commerce deliveries to O2O (online-to-offline) services. Each of those steps has built new bridges between the online world and our physical

Over one-quarter of Chinese workers are still on farms, with another quarter involved in industrial production.