Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

China’s other advantage, he said, was data. In each socioeconomic era, he liked to say, there was one primary means of production. In the agricultural era, it was about the land. “It doesn’t matter how many people you have. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. You cannot produce more if you do not have more land.” In the industrial era, it was about labor and equipment. In the new era, it was about data. “Without data, you cannot build a speech recognizer. It does not matter how many people you have. You may have one million brilliant engineers, but you won’t be able to build a system that understands language and can have a dialogue. You won’t be able to build a system that can recognize images like I do right now.” China would rule this era because it would have more data. Because its population was bigger, it would produce more data, and because its attitudes toward privacy were so different, it would have the freedom to pool this data together. “People are less privacy sensitive. The need for privacy is universal, but the treatment is very different in China, the policy regime is different.”