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Comment by throwawayecchai | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Government is all over the Silicon Valley these days trying to get into US AI developments, using all sorts of nefarious tricks.

A case in point. There is a conference, SYNC 2017, in Computer History Museum tomorrow (July 14th), organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team.

They have several good speakers, and some Chinese, Gov fronted, fake VC types.

Till 2 days ago, it was titled SYNC 2017 - Unbounded: Building Across Borders. Yesterday, it's title was changed to SYNC 2017 - US China AI Summit

It is pretty clear that if they had gone with the US China AI Summit in the beginning several of their speakers may not have agreed, but now it is too late for anyone to change mind.

Edited: To change from "Chinese" to "Chinese Gov." to clarify I'm referring to the Chinese Gov and not Chinese people

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(Chinese citizen here)

I do know a decent number of top Chinese VCs looking into investments in Silicon Valley. Those funds are typically started by Chinese entrepreneurs who made a fortune in things like the internet wave or real estates.

There do exist branches of Chinese government, or nation-owned organization making investments in US. But they are not the top VCs, and I haven't seen any of them taking a stake in a top US AI startup.

There are a couple of reasons why Chinese money is flooding into silicon valley. First, there is too much cash in the domestic market and not enough good tech investments to make. Second, there is a fear that Chinese economy might crash someday so having oversea investment diversifies the risk.

To be fair, China is a AI powerhouse in its own right. China is investing a lot of its money domestically on this problem as well. Lots of legitimate papers come from purely Chinese teams. ResNet was developed by a purely Chinese team. A lot of very important open source machine learning software out there is written almost entirely by Chinese nationals.

It's important to note this because shutting down Silicon Valley/US access to Chinese VCs and companies won't necessarily just harm them. It would harm us as well. It does need to be looked at though, just carefully.

> ResNet was developed by a purely Chinese team.

And by luck. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it, whether it be US, UK, or Canada. Proof? Look at the developments and publications from that same team. There are not consistent breakthroughs.

This is similar to the stock market and investors. Someone will get lucky and win, but unless they can do it consistently, it's luck.

Spoken like a true racist.

There are similar problems on both sides of any nationalistic argument, and both sides routinely violate the rules here, as indeed you have been doing here and elsewhere. Would you please stop doing that?

What is my side? I don't want to break any rules here, please point out which posts have broken them so I can adjust.

Recently attended the AI for Good conference hosted at the UN ITU, and two of the Gold Sponsors were really sketchy looking "AI" startups with Chinese VC funding, WikiOmni and Word4App: https://itu4u.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/why-wikiomni-and-word...

Hey guys. Chen here. I am an editor at PingWest and one of the organizer of this event.

From what I know we don't have government background or funding. PingWest is a privately owned and funded media company in China. We run one of the most influential tech blogs there. Our US team organize SYNC events every year in the Valley and some pop up SYNC events elsewhere.

We changed the title simply because it fits the event and our speakers lineup better.

    organized by Pingwest, which itself seems like a Chinese Gov. front if you look at the team.

I am PingWest subscriber on WeChat and generally quite fond of their writing. Last night, I privately and specifically asked Thomas Luo [1][2], the co-founder of PingWest, whether they have connection to Chinese government. Thomas denied the claim. Also looking at his resume, there isn't much I would raise the flags of being a government front. So my question for you is this: what are you smoking?

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/thomas-luo#/entity

[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasluoyihang/

"seems like a Chinese front if you look at the team."

...you mean it's Chinese people? What on earth makes this a "Chinese front" rather than just a company with a Chinese team?

Didn't downvote, but curious: how do you know the Chinese VC's are fake?

By fake I mean fronts for the Chinese Gov. There have been numerous reports in NYTimes and other reputable media on this topic, including many that have been posted here on HN.

Of course not all of them are such, but many are. Just look at the team behind many of these, team's credentials and experience, and in many cases their addresses and actual offices.

Really curious what about an address tells you that a company is a front for the Chinese government. Do you mean it's an address in Beijing?

Throwaway accounts propagating dark insinuations about nefarious nations are really not what we're looking for here. Would you please stop?

Would love for the down voters to explain why.

You described Chinese people organizing and attending an open technical conference with permission, and offer the unproven statement that several speakers would have refused to speak if they had known just how "Chinese" it was going to be ahead of time.

I'm not sure how those speakers couldn't just cancel, sure they'd lose any speaking fees but I've never heard of lock-in speaking contracts for conferences. Or if they care so much they could just modify their speeches to not supply anything of value. Or perhaps they should have done their homework ahead of time.

In any case I'd hardly call it a "nefarious trick" regardless of who was doing it. I'm hesitant to throw out "racist", but you seem to be leaning that way...

Fair enough, but I have never ever seen a conference change it's title overnight, two days before the actual event, to such an extent.

Nefarious or not, it does seem a bait and switch - won't you agree.

I had signed up to attend, initially, now I'm not so sure.

If their goal was a bait-and-switch then why change the title? If you're trying to con someone out of information why make the victim aware of your intentions right before the con? It is possible that they thought "US China AI Summit" would be a little alienating so to get some initial sign-ups they put out something softer, but that just seems like a marketing decision. When I hear "Building Across Borders" my first thought is "Oh, it's an international conference. Let's see which countries will be there! Oh look it's a ton of Chinese people...", not really concealing anything beyond the superficial.

I have no love of the Chinese government, but this is a free exchange of ideas that is open to the public (for a $40 ticket). Given the actions of the Chinese government to date, if this is how they plan to get more technical data going into the future I'm hoping they do more of this and less hacking of proprietary/classified info. :P

English language makes it hard to separate Anti-Chinese government (Nationalism?) from Anti-Chinese people (Racism) .

I think most of these comments are referring to the former, a dislike/distrust for the PRC government, not Chinese people.