are among the sector’s most advanced globally. With the world’s largest pool of Internet users and an unprecedented amount of data, China has had marked-and controversial-success in AI, especially in fields like facial recognition. In 2017, the country set a target for AI-related industries to reach 1 trillion yuan ($148.2 billion) by 2030. Meanwhile China has framed AI as a “core driving force” in its industrial transformation and a “new focus of international competition” as it pushes for technological self-reliance. “If the United States does not act, it will likely lose its leadership position in AI to China in the next decade and become more vulnerable to a spectrum of AI-enabled threats,” the NSCAI report said. The US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, warned last year of the risks inherent in China’s growing grasp of the sphere. Given its potential for making weapons smarter, AI may also have major national security implications. One thing the US and China agree on is the vast potential of AI-a sweeping field that will define much future technology and which is now a key battleground in Washington and Beijing’s struggle for tech ascendancy. Current Yao students have undertaken internships too. Pony.ai’s Lou Tiancheng and Megvii’s Tang Wenbin advised Hu on founding his company, and he says hiring is easier for Taichi than for many small businesses. Hu is a beneficiary of the Yao Class talent pool. His company is backed by Sequoia China, Source Code Capital, GGV Capital and BAI Capital, having finished its series A round of financing of $50 million in February. “Just his willingness to come back to China means a lot,” said Hu Yuanming, a Yao class student from 2013 to 2017 and the chief executive officer of computer graphics startup Taichi Graphics Technology Inc. Others teach at top-flight American universities including Stanford and Princeton. Yao’s acolytes have created startups worth more than $12 billion at their peak, including Alibaba-backed facial-recognition giant Megvii Technology Ltd. Its graduates form a powerful network across the country, advising on each others’ projects and pooling resources and capital where needed. The “Yao Class”-an undergraduate computer science course at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, alma mater to President Xi Jinping and many of China’s ruling elite-has exerted a profound impact on the country’s technology pioneers and growing scientific prowess. He urged China to “take a step ahead of others, to cultivate our talents and work on our research.” The scientist, who rarely speaks to foreign media, didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s requests for an interview. “We have a very good opportunity in the next 10 or 20 years, when artificial intelligence will change the world,” Yao said in May 2019. Now he teaches a prestigious yet little-known university class that has shaped some of the country’s biggest AI startups, informed government policy and molded a generation of academics. After almost 40 years in the US, he returned to China in 2004. China-born and Harvard-trained, Yao is his country’s only recipient of the Turing Award, computer science’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. One of the field’s most influential figures is Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, whose education and professional life have straddled the world’s two biggest economies. With the potential to revolutionize everything from food production and health care to financial markets and surveillance, it’s a technology that sparks both optimism and paranoia. At a time when the US and China are divided on everything from economics to human rights, artificial intelligence is still a point of particular friction.
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