Recognized as the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of China’s technological adoption, along with other innovations such as blockchain and biotech. With the potential to not only match but surpass human intellectual capabilities, AI has the potential to not only increase China’s output through the use of machine learning capabilities but also provide enhance security in the areas of monitoring.

China’s AI Master Plan

AI is a huge technological initiative driven by the state government. The 13th Five-Year Plan for Developing National Strategic and Emerging Industries (2016–2020) as well as the Made-In-China 2025 have both labelled AI as part of its technological push to better China infrastructure and economy. The ‘Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ also outlines actions to keep pace with global AI technological growth as well as steps and milestones to hit by 2020, 2025 and 2030.

Already, China has achieved notable success in the areas of facial recognition. Hong Kong-based AI firm SenseTime is currently the world most valued AI start-up and provides facial recognition technology to brands such as Huawei, Oppo and Weibo. Toutiao, another unicorn valued at approximately 80 billion dollars is a AI powered news platform that aggregate the latest news and videos, attraction hundreds of millions of daily views.

The Rise of AI Factories

However, unknown to many, AI in China is powered by tens of thousands of workers working in rural areas to scan and categorize millions of images. Despite the potential of AI to dissect and identify objects from images, the initial stages of AI involves the need to manually identify and categorize images in order for the technology to understand and learn. For instance, AI will only be able to differentiate a dog from a cat after looking at and thousands of cat images and dog images and recognizing the subtle differences. The phase where images of cats and dogs are categorized manually would require intensive labor to achieve, leading to the rise of ‘data factories’ where thousands of cheap labor in rural areas help to categorize images for the technology to learn.

According to Liang Rui of Beijing-based A.I company, “All the artificial intelligence is built on human labor”. Indeed, data factories have sprung up in second and third tier cities, offering services to tag and label images and videos, turning raw unfiltered media content into valuable data that can help fuel China’s AI growth. Most of the data factories operate in rural areas where labor is cheap and plentiful. Workers are paid higher than those working in assembly line, making data factories a high sought-after job in rural cities.

Chinese worker sorting out images in a AI factory

Data is King

This have helped build China’s key advantage over any other nation: Tens of billions of data to process and learn. This is due to China’s weak privacy laws as well as the omnipresent use of mobile apps which have allowed consumer data to be tracked and utilized. Edith Yeung, head of 500 Startups’ China unit mentioned that: “I think there are a lot of Chinese citizens really proud of the fact that we’re actually big enough to even be able to compete with the U.S. in terms of AI. And I think it is just a really exciting time to be in China.”

With plans to dominate the AI field by 2030, China’s growing AI industry and rapid advancement in areas such as image recognition and deep learning will undoubtedly propel the nation to the top spot.

** CLAP, SHARE and COMMENT!**

Hi all! I’m a freelance writer based in Singapore. I write about the latest tech happenings in the various industries as well as commentary on China. I also welcome any job opportunities that arises!

All donations will go towards paying off my student loan debt !!! ERC-20 token: 0xC70A50348efa21caD9046407d168e656bD11a0f0