China's Robots, AI development lack core algorithm/Why the AI lags behind though is invested heavily

let's watch it again this is a transformer that was hired for the opening ceremony of a shopping mall in china during the performance it suddenly caught fire and chinese people laughed and commented that the transformer was turned into naja a chinese mythological figure with wheels of fire under its feet although it was a robot played by a human real chinese robots are disappointing sometimes too on september 11th at the 2021 world robot conference in beijing china's vice minister of industry and information technology said that china's industrial robot market has been the world's number one for eight consecutive years however he also admitted that the high-end supply of china's robotics industry is still lacking and critical core technologies need further breakthroughs in this episode we explore the ai technology behind china's robotics and how advanced china really is in this regard the 20th century was known as the oil century a country that took the lead in the petrochemical industry and the industries applying petroleum products would lead the world the 21st century is known as the century of information technology and the country that takes the lead in i.t and related industries will probably control the world with china's rapid expansion in ai china and the u.s have become major competitors in this field in the process of collecting motion technical data the previous technical means required a lot of time and manpower since 2018 we have developed the aei system for marketless human movement automatic capture and analysis based on this system the data that we needed several hours to collect can be obtained in a few minutes artificial intelligence or ai in a nutshell is the simulation of human consciousness and thought processes using machine learning and data analysis methods to give machines human-like capabilities since the chinese communist party or ccp launched the made in china 2025 strategy in 2015 artificial intelligence has been the focus of its development china has introduced several regulations and supporting policies to boost the industry with the force of an entire nation in addition to economic development the ccp believes that the emerging technological revolution especially ai can help consolidate its authoritarian centralized system in 2014 the chinese government launched a social credit system that links the social behavior of all ordinary citizens to a mass surveillance system using facial recognition technology and big data analytics for mass social control with the help of ai by 2020 the system was linked to almost all public services including employment and education opportunities loans and the purchase of flight and high-speed rail tickets all of which could be controlled through networking for example the communist government recently asked its citizens to download a software called national anti-fraud center and if they failed to do so they would be referred to the police this control measure has been propagated to the whole society in the form of health codes during the covet 19 outbreak in addition to the policy support from the chinese government the big leap in ai development in china is also being driven by massive capital from wall street china's news agency xinhua reported that the u.s accounted for 39 of the total 26.6 billion u.s dollars in first-round financing for global ai companies in 2019 with china accounting for 13 followed by the uk at 7 japan at 5.3 percent in india at 4.9 percent much of the venture capital invested in china's ai industry has come from wall street all of china's leading high-tech companies almost without exception are backed by large u.s capital with baidu tencent alibaba and bike dance all listed on wall street the investment arms of these companies invest heavily in chinese high-tech companies including ai startups in a report titled a study of china's growing ai companies deloitte notes that china's ai industry will top 500 billion rmb or 78.4 billion us dollars by 2025. so is china's ai technology already very sophisticated and advanced there are two major aspects of ai development one is computing and the other is data whoever has faster computing and more data will win the ai race a report in 2019 by the center for data innovation that compared the us china in the eu and ai showed that the u.s was leading in four areas of ai development talent research development and hardware while china held the lead in two areas data and applications this conclusion is roughly the same as the findings of several other studies the reason china is leading in both data and applications is that chinese law requires companies to obey the government in such a system large high-tech companies follow the government's orders and their products are mandated by the government to collect huge amounts of data easily as a result china has a lot of data to train ai models it can quickly put ai technology into the application and therefore can grow very quickly in a short period naturally there are inherent flaws in the ccp's big data when it relies entirely on local data as it can only be limited to local users and isn't universally useful so where does china's ai industry fall short the answer given by goldman sachs in its 2017 report was chips this is because the computing power of ai depends largely on chips the most mainstream ai chip is the general purpose chip namely the graphics processor or gpu two american companies nvidia and amd have an overwhelming dominance in gpu technology according to a report by tom's hardware in june 2021 nvidia alone accounted for 81 percent of the standalone gpu shipments in the first quarter of 2021 and amd accounted for 19 at present semi-custom chips fpgas or field programmable gate arrays are growing into the mainstream in the fpga chip market all the four major manufacturers are in the us and they are silinx intel's altera lattice and micro semi together the four giants account for more than 98 of the fpga market in addition there are fully customized asic architecture's dedicated chips tailored to specific needs this type of chip is still a long way from commercialization on a large scale these chips are mainly applicable to artificial intelligence terminals including robots drones and autonomous driving because of the large difference in demand the traditional chip makers are actively engaged chinese companies including huawei hi silicon and cambricon of the chinese academy of sciences have also joined there are many manufacturers in the industry and none are dominating because of this the ccp considers asic chips as its breakthrough opportunity in the chip race however even the domestic asic chips are mainly manufactured by overseas manufacturers such as tsmc and can't do without the patented chip technology of the us although there are some fpga companies backed by the government in china there are big gaps in product performance power consumption and functionality compared to the four major manufacturers in the u.s [Music] in industrial robots the three most technically difficult core components are first the controller equivalent to the human brain second the servo machine or servo system equivalent to the human heart third the precision reducer equivalent to the joints of an arm currently 85 of the brain market 90 of the heart market and over 80 percent of the arm joint system market for chinese robots are served by foreign brands among them japan has the absolute leading position in robot reducers i.e arm joints 75 of precision reducers in the global robotics industry are currently provided by two japanese companies nabtesco and harmonic drive take a look at this robot introduced by the hubei provincial government during the outbreak it requires people to bite down on a biting device to facilitate the testing process for the heart of the robot or special servo motors japanese products lead with a market share of about 50 percent while european brands represented by siemens bosch and snyder occupy a high-end market of servo motors in china with an overall market share of about 30 percent finally for the controller the most important component of the robot i.e the brain a professional article in china states outright that there is a big gap between domestic and foreign industrial robots and the reason is that china hasn't acquired the core algorithm a member from the chinese academy of engineering said at the beginning of 2021 even if ai applications are done well if the core algorithm isn't working then innovation won't be possible another member of the academy also said in 2019 with the core algorithm lacking the development of artificial intelligence faces a stuck neck dilemma in terms of basic algorithms 93 of chinese developers use open source software packages developed by u.s institutions it means china relies heavily on u.s open-sourced algorithms for example tensorflow by google and microsoft github is the most popular software packages used by researchers in china and the us why is it that despite heavy investment by the government china still lags relatively behind in ai talent research development and hardware we have explored this subject in previous episodes on chip research and development in china in general in a corrupt system and environment where crooks can get rich by exploiting government policies there are fewer and fewer techies in china who can endure hardship and loneliness and commit themselves to r d [Applause] a us-based commentator on current affairs in china said if the ccp takes the lead in artificial intelligence the fate of humanity will face a huge shift ai technology could give rise to a new generation of intelligent weapons and cyber attack technology which could be more threatening than nuclear weapons these technologies could accomplish almost instantaneous total control and destruction of a country's infrastructure as well as weapon systems it's going to be the model for future warfare accomplished by the touch of a few buttons in front of a computer in the ai field since the u.s has an irreplaceable monopoly on ai's basic hardware the chip it would be simple logic to assume that if the us wanted to curb china's ai development it would simply cut off the supply of ai chips however as we have discussed before there are too many people in the world outside of china who don't yet understand the ccp's mindset [Music] [Music] you