Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

This trend is also evident in conferences like ICML, CVPR and EMNLP.[1] I have a semi-popular open source ML project [2] and the repo gets more Chinese visitors/users (from posts on Weibo/WeChat etc.) than all other countries including USA.

I think Chinese researchers & government have a key advantage in collecting enormous datasets, e.g. I wouldn't be amazed if they end up with state of the art models for problems such as object-detection/segmentation for videos taken from Vehicles, Medicine/Radiology and face recognition [3]. Several US strategic funding agencies seem to be pursuing projects with this implicit assumption.

While american government agencies do collect data at a similar scale (Body Cams, Police dashcams), inefficiency in data sharing significantly complicate their use.

[1] https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institutio...

[2] http://www.deepvideoanalytics.com/

[3] https://github.com/seetaface/SeetaFaceEngine

On an unrelated note: If you have a popular Github repo, you can view the Google Analytics style stats under graphs/traffic for referring urls/unique-visitor counts etc.

This is not news to anyone who reads AI papers: the number of Chinese authors is amazing.

Crazy thought: what if the AI is in 10-20 years the first field in which major breakthroughs will be first published in Mandarin instead of in English. Language is power, and currently English speaking countries have the edge.

Those top-rated Chinese researchers are publishing in English. Their Chinese-only venues are not at the caliber that they would consider publishing ground breaking work to.

Yet.

Critical mass is a weird thing.

Of course, but especially in the applied sector of ML, it can happen that interesting blog posts and code examples are increasingly written in Mandarin.

The *ACL conferences (major NLP venues) decided to allow presentations to be in Mandarin now; the rationale being that a lot of presentations were in such poor English already, might as well let half the audience be engaged.

It will take at least a few more years before submissions are allowed in Chinese: reviewers can't be assumed to know Chinese. The momentum is there though.

I'd hope that by then AI would have advanced well enough to enable us to navigate the language jungle more easily. Who knows, maybe the theory related to this will be one of those seminal Mandarin papers?

Debatable. If we add up all the English speaking or English-inclined countries, we get: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, South Africa, all of Northern Europe and plenty of other places which are culturally closer to English-speaking countries than to Mandaring-speaking ones (one :) ).

China has a huge mass but it's just one object. The Anglosphere has several big objects and a ton of smaller ones and overall I'd say it is much bigger and has a longer reach.

I prefer the garden vs the forest analogy when it comes to China vs the Rest. As our models of never ending growth break down, transitions to newer sustainable models require controls that China is in a better position to exercise than the current chaotic environments we see elsewhere. I see lot of confusion in the minds of leaders in the rest of the world of what they should transition too. And that confusion percolates down economic and r&d activities. It's not going to resolve it self any time soon given the clowns our freedom and idea spreading social media is propping up.

Ofcourse even the best gardeners can fuck up but if I was betting on the best outcomes in 10-20 years I would bet on China.

Well, if English-speaking countries can't keep up with Chinese-speaking ones as far as AI is concerned, hopefully they will at least make enough progress to do accurate Chinese-to-English machine translation.

It's the same thing also for the newest CRISPR related papers, so I guess it's true generally for cutting edge research

One anecdotal data point - https://www.math.uci.edu/~zhao/publication/mypapers/pdf/surf... - note the authors and the funders - certainly a data point reinforcing the argument

Chinese yes, China? Seems not even close from the first link you posted.

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