Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engineers.
Small US companies don't have access to enough data.
Companies in China have both lots of user data (1B+ internet users), and no privacy concerns about running ML experiments on that data (and observing user behaviour till they find success).
Hence, China will win the next wave of ML-powered social apps.
But they are competing with companies now which don't have the same ideological issues.
edit: and Newsdog, from the end of the article. My opinion is looking shaky.
I kind a have to agree, even my company starting to shift a lot of development work to team in china. Their output and hard work has been amazing.
America has gotten way too comfy with the idea that it's number 1 and forgotten that it's not an intrinsic role given to it, but something it had to work for. It's starting to look a little rough.
An example is the electric vehicle. Though EV cannot replace traditional vehicles at a full scale right now, the traditional vehicle industry is not very efficient, things are not standardized or intentionally walled by monopolies. As for EV, conceptually it should be simpler, more straightforward, and more standardized, then companies can easily prototyping and mass-producing EV on a really large scale - that's what China good at, what they're not good at is they don't have recognizable branding, but there are not too many EV brandings as traditional vehicle brandings like Daimler or VW. Both government and companies see this as a great opportunity to lead these market so it's been greatly promoted.
The semiconductor industry is another field that China may want to compete in the future. Traditionally, Intel is pretty much non-challengable. However, since mobile become dominant, and Apple started to get rid of X86 and move to Arm, there might be a big change in the future. If operating systems and software are willing to support Arm, it would create yet another chance for China to participate in the competition.
Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands.
I was seeing a Vice video on the surveillance technologies the companies are building in China where the engineer building it was so excited to show the technology he had built not thinking about how invasively it tracks everything, keeps history etc. I would just call it a cultural gap.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/business/facial-recogniti...
In PRC, because of cultural differences I think most people accept the crime safety net you get over personal freedom restrictions and you can't really meaningfully challenge any such move even if you wanted to. Anyway, it is the same in Singapore and people seem happy with it despite being exposed to all the Western culture too, so I think it is a cultural thing.
The thing that British were the first to roll out this but we haven't seen any advanced analysis stuff out in public after it kind of shows the apprehensiveness around it.
The Facebook Newsfeed UI, for example, has to balance so many different signals. Compare that with TikTok's UI, which is very efficient at collecting a clear reinforcement signal and only has to deal with one homogenous kind of data. It's like the entire TikTok team, not just the data scientists, focused in on doing ML really well.
I'm really impressed and kind of scared whenever I use TikTok. It really does feel like a whole different level of ML-powered addictiveness, designed from the ground up rather than having the ML part added on.