Can India catch up with China in Artificial Intelligence
By Ashok K Nag*
In 2017, the need for Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and talent gained the attention of policy makers worldwide after China’s ambitions became clear from A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. Today, 30 nations have formulated strategies to build AI capabilities, according to The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, published by Stanford University. This report includes an interactive visualization of global cross-country comparisons across 22 indicators.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the New Electricity,” Andrew Ng said in a speech in 2017 at Stanford University, where he is an adjunct professor. He was then also the chief scientist at Baidu, the Chinese Internet search company with a market value of $58 billion.
Perhaps Ng was obliquely referring to Vladimir Lenin’s claim that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Lenin led the Communist Party when it seized power in Russia in 1917.
Indeed, AI will play an important role in the progress of a nation’s economic and military power, as expressed by another Communist strongman, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. In 2017, speaking to a group of Russian school children, Putin said AI “is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
“AI is a foundational science in the same sense that physics is a foundational science,” Amir Husain, a computer scientist told Nature. He founded SparkCognition, a company in Austin, Texas, that creates AI-based analytic and security systems. “A lot of people think that AI is a product or technology, but it’s actually an enabler for almost everything we do.”
The current stated goal of national AI strategies is to automate human activities which are dependent on analysis of numerical, textual, image and other data. However, as AI technology advances, it is perhaps likely that nations will seek to build machines which replicate the functions of the human brain.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has been the leader in AI research and adoption, followed closely by China in recent years. In fact, China is expected to soon overtake the U.S. An early indication of this shift is that the Chinese are publishing nearly as many research papers in reputed AI journals as the Americans, according to a study by Nature, which looked at the application of AI to the natural sciences.
India trails far behind the U.S. and China in terms of research publications. Also, not one Indian university is among the Top 100 universities in the World, ranked by number of AI research articles, according to Nature.
China’s GOAL: $1.5 trillion in AI revenues by 2030
China’s 2017 Next Generation AI Development Plan sets specific objectives in the field of AI as well as a time frame for achieving them. One of its key goals is to become the technical and business leader of the world: it wants to “seize the strategic initiative in the new stage of international competition in AI development.” Hence, China is pursuing market dominance through the “commercialization of AI technology”. and the creation of a “competitive advantage.”
China’s 2017 plan sets specific objectives in the field of AI as well as a time frame for achieving them. One of its key goals is be the technical and business leader: it wants to “seize the strategic initiative in the new stage of international competition in AI development.” China is hence pursuing market dominance through the “commercialization of AI technology” and the creation of a “competitive advantage.”
China has already achieved significant progress in several areas, notably big data intelligence and autonomous intelligence systems. In these areas, Alibaba, Weibo, Tencent, Huawei and other major Chinese technology companies are aggressively pursuing products and services. While this could help them grow their corporate revenues and profits, the companies are also enabling the Chinese government to meet its AI goals.
In addition to the multi-billion dollar companies, China has over 1,500 AI start-ups, many of them backed and funded by China’s central and state governments.
By 2025, China wants to create AI with “autonomous learning ability,” which will be used by its businesses to enter “the global value chain.” AI will enable the building of “intelligent manufacturing, intelligent medicine, intelligent city, intelligent agriculture and national defence construction.” In 2025, revenues of China’s core AI businesses ought to exceed 400 billion RMB, US $62 billion, and that of related industries more than 5 trillion RMB, $773billion, the plan states.
By 2030, China wants to become the world’s primary AI innovation center in the areas of “brain-inspired intelligence, autonomous intelligence, hybrid intelligence, swarm intelligence” and related areas. In that year, the core AI Industry in China ought to attain revenues of $155 billion, the plan states, while revenues of all related businesses should exceed $1.5 trillion.
China’s other AI goal is political. It views AI as a tool to “grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner; and take the initiative in decision-making and reactions—which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.” Shorn of the technical jargon, China also views wide and deep adoption of AI as a tool of mass surveillance and mass compliance to keep the ruling Communist Party in power.
India’s AI plans -no goals and no timeline
In 2018, India published its National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence #AI for ALL. The goal is to “leverage AI for economic growth, social development and inclusive growth, and finally as a ‘Garage’ for (other) emerging and developing economies.”
India’s AI focus is on healthcare; agriculture; education; smart cities and infrastructure; smart mobility; and transportation. Not surprisingly, being a country with high unemployment, India’s strategy makes no mention of applying AI to manufacturing automation, which is already a major business in the U.S. and other Western nations as well as in China.
The Indian plan identifies three major challenges: lack of organized and accessible big data; little research, particularly in core areas of theory and fundamental technologies; and absence of AI expertise and insufficient learning opportunities.
The Indian government plans to overcome the challenges by accelerating the adoption of AI through opening up government data sets and setting up a digital research, knowledge and assimilation platform; setting up centres of research excellence, including ones aimed at attracting global talent; reskilling and training; and responsible AI development by adopting a data privacy legal framework.
But there is no time frame for dealing with the challenges. Also, unlike the Chinese strategy, India has not set specific objectives, including revenue figures. Hence, stating India is pursuing #AIforAll sounds nice but offers little substance.
India lags far behind China in AI, according to several reports as well as other indicators. India, for instance, has about 26,000 robots while China has about 780,000.
China also has a big lead in AI tools for natural language processing, which would be of enormous benefit to India, given its 20 major languages. In 2017, for instance, a Chinese company iFlyTek broadcast an imitation of then U.S. president Donald Trump’s speech in Mandarin, largely maintaining the speaker’s tone and intonation, according to The New York Times. So far, no comparable product has been developed by an Indian company.
India is viewed by the U.S. and other Western nations as an economic and military ally against China. But Western governments are not making major investments to incubate and boost India’s AI capabilities, while Western companies do not see it as a profitable pursuit.
Since the 1970’s, Western companies, especially in the U.S., have been major beneficiaries of the World quality engineering and scientific talent Indian immigrants have supplied to advanced technology “garages” around the globe. However, India’s AI strategy does not discuss how such talent will be retained to develop AI within the country.
China’s spending for research and development (R&D) is more than six times that of India: $380 billion for China in 2020, while India spent about $60 billion. While these figures represent overall R&D spending across the entire economy, they offer a rough indication of the relative advantage of capital and market opportunities available in China for AI businesses compared to that in India.
In 2019, speaking of China’s AI goals at the World Economic Forum, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, which has a market value of $530 billion, said “technological innovation is a primary factor behind global conflicts” and AI “is the third technology revolution — we’re coming.”
*Ashok Kumar Nag is a Mumbai based consultant in information management and data analysis. He spent over 25 years in the Statistics and Information Management department of the Reserve Bank of India, retiring as an adviser. Ashok earned a Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. Link
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