The Seven Giants of AI.

Alphabet

The multinational conglomerate is a parent company of Google and is by far the leader in Artificial Intelligence with access to a large share of the world’s brightest AI minds. Half of the worlds top 100 AI researchers and engineers already work for Google. Its R&D budget dwarfs US federal funding for science and research by a factor of over 2. 

Facebook

Facebook has superstar researchers like the French Yann Le Cun who is a top dawg in mobile robotics, machine learning and computer vision. He is now the Chief AI scientist at Facebook leading their AI rasearch. Facebook has also been extra interested in robotics lately.

Amazon

We all know about Amazon AI knowing what you want to buy before you even know what you want so this needs no introduction. Amazon is currently competing to win a Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI)  contract by DoD worth 1$0 billion to use their Amazon Web Services Platform for storing sensitive military data.

Microsoft

Chocolates and AI. See Hershey's Snack Company using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to enhance productivity and brainstorm ways to enhance customer satisfaction. Led by computer vision expert Larry Shum, Microsoft's giant group of 5000 AI engineers and scientists will accelerate deployment of AI across apps, services and infrastructure.

Alibaba & Tencent

These companies are little late to the AI party but they have the capital and have built their data generation platforms to feed their AI. Tencents WeChat App is known as a super-app which boasts 1 billion active daily users - the most in the world. The only other app that comes close is Instagram but the data generated there is strictly for photos.

Alibaba built City Brain – a massive AI-driven network that optimizes city services by using data from traffic lights, video cameras, social transit and location-based apps. So far City-Brain has been seen working to ease congestion in some of the largest cities in China.

Baidu

Baidu – the Google of China started their Deep Learning research the earliest among the Chinese tech giants. Baidu recruited Andrew Ng, one of the world’s top researchers in machine learning and AI to head its Silicon Valley AI Research Lab in 2014. Baidu is the first Chinese company to join the Partnership on AI (PAI) which includes US giants like Amazon to work on ethics of AI. Yes we need to build AI with ethics and engineers hold the key to safety and welfare of the public.

Colossus

The largest Arduino Starter Kit in the World. There is nothing like it.

The story of AI.

In May 2017, AlphaGo AI backed by Google beat the world’s best player in the abstract and complex game of Go.

The Chinese teenager Kie-Jie lost all three games of Go to its AI counterpart AlphaGo. He tried everything but the AI slowly and systematically dismantled Kie-Jie in the 3-hour long games.

Back in 2016, AlphaGo won its first high profile match against the legendary Korean player Lee Sedol. Unnoticed to most of America, this 5-series game was watched by some 280 million Chinese viewers.

China Go.

Less than two months after AlphaGo won against Kie-Jie, the Chinese government issued an ambitious plan to build out their Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Since then, the Chinese government poured greater funding, brought policy support and the national coordination of AI research and development.

AI needs four important ingredients for development: Data, engineers, supporting policies and tenacious entrepreneurs.

Data is the most valuable commodity in the world today. If you have data, you can train your AI neural network approach to learn and make decisions. The more data you have, the faster the AI can learn and recognize patterns and identify things in the real world. China is leading in the implementation of its AI technology. China also has an abundance of data to use with their AI algorithms generated from its large population.

Only a rural farmer economy 30 years ago, China has already surpassed the United States in terms of the sheer volume of data produced. It's not only important to collect a large amount of data, but the layers and type of data collected are also important for the AI to learn and make decisions.

Age of Implementation.

We are currently in the age of implementation of the knowledge and tools we have developed. The bulk of the research in AI has been completed and at this time, performing more research brings diminishing returns and finding the next breakthrough is going to be much harder to find.

However, we have an abundance of tools to implement AI technology. Engineers instead of researches are more crucial now because according to author Kai-Fu Lee in his book AI Superpowers, “much of the difficult abstract work of AI research has already been done. Its time for the entrepreneurs to roll up their sleeves to use AI algorithms to build sustainable businesses.”

The research is important but it’s time to implement what we have learned in AI in the past 20 years to make gains for society. We have to accelerate deployment and China has already sounded the horn for the national call of AI mobilization.

In China, they use mobile payments for almost everything. No credit cards, no cash or debit cards. You just scan a bar code and your account on WeChat Wallet or Alipay gets charged automatically. Inserting a chip into the credit card machine seems very clunky and slow. Even beggars are cashless and use a QR code for donation.

The United States Needs to Mobilize.

This is our call to the United States to build out its Artificial Intelligence capabilities. This is a call for mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation. China is very close to catching up to the US and we have to maintain the lead if we want to have a chance and reap the benefits of AI in the new world.

Don’t take it from us. Here is what former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the 2017 conference in Artificial Intelligence and global security about China on AI. Take this as a warning and he was blunt in his remarks. He said “Trust me, these Chinese people are good…If you have any kind of prejudice or concern that somehow their system and their educational system is not going to produce the kind of people I’m talking about, you’re wrong.”

The Chinese are brute forcing AI development and implementation and we need to start taking this seriously. Some say they are already working on 6G technology. We leave you with this video for a wake-up call.

Why A&R Exists..

We want to accelerate the innovation in robotics by putting the tools that are already available in the most hands possible of future leaders.

We need engineers, entrepreneurs and tinkerers to revive the fundamental powers that built the United States to the superpower and world leader it is today. We need not forget how this great country was built and stay true to our calling of hard work, spirit of innovation, strong will and diversity. The leader in AI and robotics deployment will bring unparalleled productivity gains not seen since the Industrial Revolution if and only if we can harness and implement it correctly.

Join the revolution.

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