Ai Superpowers: Exploring China, Silicon Valley, and the Impact on the Global Economy

Luc: Kai-Fu Lee spends the first half of his book to explain the differences between Tech leaders and entrepreneurs in the US and in China, and why the latter will win the AI war.
And then in the second half he explains why all these ambitions to prevail are worthless, and how AI should just be a tool serving a humanity having completely changed its values from material success to « love and be loved ».
All of this is based on the author’s personal life and that is what makes it convincing.

France on Aug 18, 2023

Amazon Customer: Lots of interesting information about trends involving machine learning in the near future. The author isnt shy about his political leanings, but doesnt go over the top in pushing them on the reader. There is a certain naivete when it comes to assumptions about human nature, but this lack of knowledge in this field is usual for people from his socio economic background (i.e. tech geeks), so it can be excused. Overall pleasant and informative.

United Kingdom on Mar 12, 2023

Aakash: Kai-Fu Lee has penned an absolute gem of a book! He makes a thoughtful and evidence-based argument, successfully, in my view, that China is going to win the AI race. This argument is the crux of this book, and he looks at several facets and provides excellent reasoning and examples to make his point.
According to Kai-Fu, China will win the AI race due to the following reasons:

1. Access to an enormous volume of quality data (growth expected to surpass 10x that of the USA and Europe combined)
2. A cutthroat entrepreneurial environment, where only the best of best can survive - akin to gladiators in a coliseum
3. Increasing access to highly skilled AI experts
4. Government sponsorship at the highest levels wanting to make China the leader in this space

Data is the fuel driving development of the AI landscape. The more quality data you can feed a model, the better it gets. The extraordinary adoption of "super-apps", such as WeChat and Alipay, has resulted in skyrocketing data volumes in China. These super apps are vertically integrated (app within an app without downloading separate apps) and a "one-stop-shop" for anything you need. The secret ingredient in...

Australia on Mar 18, 2021

Puneet S. Lamba: Lee's predictions are unsettling and at first. Being an American citizen I found myself getting defensive about how rosy the picture Lee paints looks for China. But the author patiently and fairly elaborates on why his forecast is what it is. A few chapters in I found myself gradually coming around to seeing the validity of his arguments.

The China Advantage

Apart from Lee's fondness for the word "juggernaut", the book is well-written and informative. Having worked in China, I have first-hand experience of how they've modernized themselves almost overnight to become the envy of the world. I have had the pleasure of traveling on their fast trains, e.g. the one connecting Shanghai to Hangzhou (a technology hub and home to the Chinese e-Commerce "juggernaut" Alibaba), and they are second to none. After visiting China, it is embarrassing to return to Boston and ride the T, as the Greater Boston transit system is known.

Perhaps not unlike other developing nations, many in China went straight from cash to mobile payments, entirely skipping over credit/debit cards. By contrast, mobile payments are barely used in the US because everyone is already accustomed to credit...

United States on Jan 30, 2021

Nori: Nori
AI Superpowers Book Review:
AI has slowly but surely crept into our lives. Although many dismiss AI as some far fetched figment of our imagination which could affect us in the future , AI is already controlling many aspects of our lives, Google employs AI marketing teams which analyse user data to target more personalised ads that a user is more likely to click on and thus create more revenue for google. AI softwares are used by banks to analyse the credit scores of potential loan seekers to asses the likelihood of the loan being paid. Machine learning algorithms such as Google’s TensorFlow harness and analyse the data of millions of patients with terminal illness to determine the length of time they have left to live, with a much higher degree of accuracy with no pessimism or over optimism over the period a patient has to live resulted in less grief for the patient and their families.
For many AI seems to be a direct threat to their jobs, such as those who work in the information processing sector, as AI is able to complete their service with increased speed and efficiency and the added benefits of low maintenance, no salary and no sick or maternity leave. Workers...

United Kingdom on May 02, 2020

sean s.: Venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee is the former president of Google China, so is uniquely qualified to contextualize and comment on the AI competition between the United States and China. He describes how China was late to wake up to the world-transforming importance of AI:

“But where was China in all this? The truth is, the story of the birth of deep learning took place almost entirely in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The great majority of China’s technology community didn’t properly wake up to the deep-learning revolution until its Sputnik Moment in 2016…

During the age of AI discovery, progress was driven by a handful of elite thinkers, virtually all of whom were clustered in the United States and Canada…” Indeed, the number 1 textbook on artificial intelligence, “Deep Learning” is co-written by University of Montreal professors Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, and Bloomberg’s video “The Rise of AI” explains how Canada became an AI superpower.

“Of the hundreds of companies pouring resources into AI research, seven have emerged as the new giants of corporate AI research – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu,...

Canada on Sep 30, 2018

Scott Meredith: An excellent overview of Chinese activity in artificial intelligence from ground zero perspective. Lee shows how two strands (China and AI) are being irreversibly woven together into an unbreakable high-power cable that will transform, control, and possibly strangle humanity’s economic future.

The inciting incident for both Lee’s book and another comparable recent effort (Artificial Intuition: The Improbable Deep Learning Revolution, by Carlos Perez) is the recent victory in Go of an AI-based system over the best human champion of that ancient game. This had about the weight of an empty beer can in the USA and other Western news cycles, but shook the Asian intelligentsia at their core (because they care so much more about Go). Both Lee and Perez make a big deal out of the Go victory as a Sputnik moment, awakening entire East Asian populations, and their central planners, to the urgency of becoming the dominant AI superpower. Meanwhile, apart from some corporate research,
the USA snoozes blithely on. We may wake like Rip Van Winkle in 20 years (or 20 months) to find ourselves hopelessly lagging China. AI Superpowers skillfully exploits and intensifies the fear factor....

United States on Sep 27, 2018