s PECIAL REPORT
A
lphaGo, the artificial intelligence
programme developed by Google,
has just won the first of three games
against China’s Go prodigy Ke Jie in Hainan.
This follows Alpha Go’s defeat of Lee Sedol,
another top player of this ancient board game
in Marc h 2016. With its complicated posi-
tioning and endless possibilities, Go is sup-
posed to be more difficult than chess for AI
programme to master.
But AlphaGo has also got other
competitors in China. One of them is Jueyi,
or FineArt, developed by Chinese tech
giant Tencent. After winning 10 straight
games against Ke Jie, the world’s No. 1
player, in February, Jueyi won the
championship title in the 10th Computer
Go UEC Cup in Japan in March. Although
AlphaGo was absent, the event attracted 30
of the world’s best Go AI programmes,
including Facebook’s Darkforest, Japan’s
Deep Zen Go and France’s Crazy Stone.Jueyi represents the rising ambitions of
Chinese tech companies in the emerging
field of artificial intelligence, previously dom-
inated by US companies.AI Boom
China’s AI sector, like most forms of com-
puting in China, is led by the BAT, an acro-
nym referring to China’s Internet triumvirate
Baidu, Alibaba Group and Tencent Hold-
ings. Baidu is known for its dominant search
engine, Alibaba Group for the country’s top
e-commerce platform, and Tencent for social
networks and gaming.
With an estimated 730 million Internet
users and 630 million smart phone users in
China, the development of the Internet in
recent years has allowed the three companies
access to a huge volume of data, a major ad-
vantage in AI research and development.
Baidu was the first Chinese company to
open a US-based AI lab, launching its sitein Silicon Valley in 2014 with a staff of 200
researchers. It opened a second lab in March
2017, with a staff of 150 people. The com-
pany has been focusing on self-driving cars,
where it hopes to become a major competi-
tor of Uber and Alphabet (Google’s parent
company).
Tencent Holdings established an AI lab
in Shenzhen in April last year, which has
50 computer scientists and 200 engineers
working on fundamental research and the
practical applications of AI. The firm opened
its own US-based AI lab in Seattle in May,
which will focus on research in speech rec-
ognition.
The Alibaba Group’s AI ambitions are
built upon its growing cloud service, which
grew by 115 percent in 2016. On March 28,
Alibaba Cloud, the company’s public cloud
division, announced two new AI services, ET
Medical Brain and ET Industrial Brain after
its flagship AI programme ET, along with aAI in China
national Ambitions
Chinese entrepreneurs want national policies to back up the country’s Artificial Intelligence efforts
By Yu Xiaodong