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

by Kai-Fu Lee

But if the next deep learning 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. It was one of the earliest companies to see the potential in deep learning and has devoted more resources to harnessing it than any other company. 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. That spending spree has bought Alphabet an outsized share of the world’s brightest AI minds. Of the top one hundred AI researchers and engineers, around half are already working for Google. The other half are distributed among the remaining Seven Giants, academia, and a handful of smaller startups.