The Wall Street Journal reported on January 23, 2018 that last Fall a U.S. intelligence-community contest sought algorithms that could identify surveillance images of people out of a database of millions of photos. The dark-horse victor was Shanghai-based artificial-intelligence startup Yitu Tech. But, it revealed, Yitu had access to Chinese security databases and photos of faces of 1.8 billion people that it could use to train and refine its algorithms. Yitu also works on behalf of multiple security agencies in China and is using its trove of information, it has learned to scan photos and find matches in seconds, to do jobs like authenticating the identity of ATM users. The article said at stake is whether U.S. giants -- including Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- can retain their lead in the global tech race or whether they will be overtaken by Chinese behemoths Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the Chinese search engine Baidu, which is smaller but has invested heavily in AI. China has around 500 AI companies, according to a December report from Tencent's in-house research institute. Saying that China hopes to close the gap with the U.S. in funding and tech development over the next three years, it pointed out that Alibaba had pledged in October to nearly triple its R&D spending to about $5 billion annually over the next three years. Disclosed funding by Chinese companies rose 10-fold in 2017 over the prior year to $7.06 billion and the Chinese government effort has launched an effort to lead the AI field by 2030. The strategy focuses on boosting areas including medicine and agriculture, as well as government and military applications.
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