“The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence,” said Subbarao
Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence.
By PAUL MOZUR and JOHN MARKOFFMAY 27, 2017
HONG KONG — Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany,
and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established.
The Defense Department found that Chinese money has been pouring into American artificial intelligence
companies — some of the same ones it had been looking to for future weapons systems.
Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups
and academic research, all with the aim of growing China’s A. I.
capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan.
This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget
that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.
Baidu — often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition — this year
opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots.
Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Didi Chuxing have opened artificial intelligence labs in America, as have some Chinese start-ups.
