AI Superpowers Quotes

“In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. 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. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“In deep learning, there’s no data like more data. The more examples of a given phenomenon a network is exposed to, the more accurately it can pick out patterns and identify things in the real world.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“the invention of deep learning means that we are moving from the age of expertise to the age of data. Training successful deep-learning algorithms requires computing power, technical talent, and lots of data. But of those three, it is the volume of data that will be the most important going forward. That’s because once technical talent reaches a certain threshold, it begins to show diminishing returns. Beyond that point, data makes all the difference. Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts if the average engineer has access to far more data.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts if the average engineer has access to far more data.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Algorithms tuned by an average engineer can outperform those built by the world’s leading experts”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Of the hundreds of companies pouring resources into AI research, let’s return to the seven that have emerged as the new giants of corporate AI research—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. In March 2017, a pair of Chinese cousins made headlines with a hapless string of robberies. The pair had traveled to Hangzhou, a wealthy city and home to Alibaba, with the goal of making a couple of lucrative scores and then skipping town. Armed with two knives, the cousins robbed three consecutive convenience stores only to find that the owners had almost no cash to hand over—virtually all their customers were now paying directly with their phones. Their crime spree netted them around $125 each—not even enough to cover their travel to and from Hangzhou—when police picked them up. Local media reported rumors that upon arrest one of the brothers cried out, “How is there no cash left in Hangzhou?”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you’ve set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.” Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“birthplace and heritage are not the sole determinants of behavior.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“China lagged years, if not decades, behind the United States in artificial intelligence. But over the past three years China has caught AI fever, experiencing a surge of excitement about the field that dwarfs even what we see in the rest of the world. Enthusiasm about AI has spilled over from the technology and business communities into government policymaking, and it has trickled all the way down to kindergarten classrooms in Beijing.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“AI will do the analytical thinking, while humans will wrap that analysis in warmth and compassion.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“When Sergei Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, just 0.2 percent of the Chinese population was connected to the internet, compared with 30 percent in the United States.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. 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.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Can you imagine the elation that comes from beating a world champion at the game you’ve devoted your whole life to mastering? AlphaGo did just that, but it took no pleasure in its success, felt no happiness from winning, and had no desire to hug a loved one after its victory. Despite”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Robotics, however, is much more difficult. It requires a delicate interplay of mechanical engineering, perception AI, and fine-motor manipulation. These are all solvable problems, but not at nearly the speed at which pure software is being built to handle white-collar cognitive tasks. Once that robot is built, it must also be tested, sold, shipped, installed, and maintained on-site. Adjustments to the robot’s underlying algorithms can sometimes be made remotely, but any mechanical hiccups require hands-on work with the machine. All these frictions will slow down the pace of robotic automation.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Realizing the newfound promise of electrification a century ago required four key inputs: fossil fuels to generate it, entrepreneurs to build new businesses around it, electrical engineers to manipulate it, and a supportive government to develop the underlying public infrastructure. Harnessing the power of AI today—the “electricity” of the twenty-first century—requires four analogous inputs: abundant data, hungry entrepreneurs, AI scientists, and an AI-friendly policy environment.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Deep-learning pioneer Andrew Ng has compared AI to Thomas Edison’s harnessing of electricity: a breakthrough technology on its own, and one that once harnessed can be applied to revolutionizing dozens of different industries.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge.
Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart.
It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build.
That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved.
Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us.
Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story.
Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“I want to create a system that provides for all members of society, but one that also uses the wealth generated by AI to build a society that is more compassionate, loving, and ultimately human.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth. Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend. Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing. Data on total trips through ride-hailing apps is somewhat scarce, but during the height of competition between Uber and Didi, self-reported numbers from the two companies had Didi’s rides in China at four times the total of Uber’s global rides. When it comes to rides on shared bikes, China is outpacing the United States at an astounding ratio of three hundred to one.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates AI deployment will add $15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030. China is predicted to take home $7 trillion of that total, nearly double North America’s $3.7 trillion in gains. As”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Ray Kurzweil—the eccentric inventor, futurist, and guru-in-residence at Google—envisions a radical future in which humans and machines have fully merged. We will upload our minds to the cloud, he predicts, and constantly renew our bodies through intelligent nanobots released into our bloodstream. Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we will have computers with intelligence comparable to that of humans (i.e., AGI), and that we will reach the singularity by 2045.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Behind these efforts lies a core difference in American and Chinese political culture: while America’s combative political system aggressively punishes missteps or waste in funding technological upgrades, China’s techno-utilitarian approach rewards proactive investment and adoption.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Instead of a dispersion of industry profits across different companies and regions, we will begin to see greater and greater concentration of these astronomical sums in the hands of a few, all while unemployment lines grow longer.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“scale—has reshaped the relationship between the digital and real”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“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.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“During China’s mass innovation push, use of local government guiding funds exploded, nearly quadrupling from $7 billion in 2013 to $27 billion in 2015.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order