Visionaries and designers of the AI future
The race for dominance in artificial intelligence is on. States, but also startups, are trying to change the world.
Where will the digital brain of our future be developed? The question encompasses more than is apparent at first glance. The leading countries will leave their mark on the rest of the world, their moral and value systems. Our society will inevitably change as a result.
The United States, Europe, China and Israel are — purely in terms of AI startups — leaders in the field of artificial intelligence. But what about when you include other criteria? The Center for Data Innovation, a non-profit research organization, has produced an interesting study on this.
USA: The United States has filed both the most AI publications and the most AI patents in the world in recent years. American companies lead the way in research and development — they have the most workers in AI and attract the most top talent. In this regard, market leaders Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (“GAFA”) benefit from their ability to attract and retain foreign talent. In addition to talent, there is also massive investment in the industry through. Ecosystems — particularly in Silicon Valley and the New York/Boston area — have become AI hubs as a result. In 2018, more than 16 government agencies (including DARPA, CIA, and NSA) also provided financial and policy support to AI companies. Not to be forgotten are America’s leading universities (such as Stanford and MIT) as well as strong corporate research institutions such as Google DeepMind. One drawback, however, is the public’s perception of artificial intelligence. Only about one-third of all Americans expect it to improve work in the future. In an international comparison, America has also lost some ground in hardware, especially the high-performance computers and supercomputers that are so important for AI.
China: The Middle Kingdom wants to become a leader in AI by 2030 and build an industry worth $150 billion. They have already drawn up concrete plans for this in 2017 in the “Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” (part of “Made in China 2025”). China’s ambitions are part of their €900bn project called the “new Silk Road”. In this, they are pursuing a centrally controlled strategy with local implementation, where cities are incentivized to build their own AI ecosystems. To this end, there is a so-called “strategic advisory commission of the new AI generation” (Engl: “National AI Team”) which includes Baidu (autonomous driving), Alibaba (cloud computing), Huawei (hardware & software infrastructure), Tencent (computer vision), iFlytek (smart audio) and SenseTime (smart vision). Financial strength is being provided to build the industry by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Regions such as Beijing and Hangzhou are investing billions to build their own AI industrial parks for hundreds of companies. In 2020, 19 other Chinese regions have announced similar AI initiatives. These investments in the future are visible: the number of patents in AI and Deep Learning has increased significantly more than compared to the US. China’s empathy for security also allows for the collection of gigantic amounts of data — the foundation of artificial intelligence. The topic of AI additionally receives broad support in the 1.4 billion-strong population: 65 percent of Chinese are convinced that AI and robotics will bring new jobs and opportunities — in Europe this is only 19 percent, in America it is still 23 percent. While in Germany 80 percent of Germans are concerned about data protection, in China the figure is only 50 percent. The door is thus wide open for technology. China integrates the topic as an elementary part of education — from elementary school to university. This is likely to accelerate development even further in the future.
Europe: Contrary to popular opinion, the European continent is not lagging behind in the development of artificial intelligence. It has the talent to compete. But compared to the U.S. and China, Europe is only strong as a continent — the individual countries, taken separately, have little impact on the industry. The strongest performer in Europe is the UK. The government has created a business-friendly climate. In addition, strong universities like Oxford and Cambridge help build talent. Looking at Europe’s current leading industries such as robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility, the picture is different. These industries, which have been built up over years to become global market leaders, are only mediocre in international AI comparisons. This raises the question of whether Europe can retain its pioneering role in the coming decades. Europe’s difficulty lies in translating qualitative AI research into business applications. To change this, 25 European countries have signed an agreement to collaborate on AI. In addition, the EU is allocating EUR1.5 billion to build artificial intelligence in 2019–2020 as part of its Horizon 2020 investment program. By comparison, Chinese investments in AI amounted to $2.3 billion in Beijing and $5 billion in Tianjin alone.
Israel: considered a hidden champion of the AI industry. It has 40x more AI companies per capita than the US. The basis is the strong linkage between the Israeli military and the digital sector. There are also many technology companies combined with quality universities and a strong ecosystem.
Pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence
- Demis Hassabis: British AI researcher and neuroscientist. Founder and CEO of Deepmind that was bought by Google in 2014 for £400m. Known for developing AlphaGo, the AI that beat the world champion in Go, one of the most complicated strategy games in the world.
- Geoffrey Hinton: Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist. Known for his work on artificial neural networks and developing disruptive innovations in Deep Learning. Referred to with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun as the “godfathers of AI” and “godfathers of Deep Learning.” Recipient of the Turing Prize in 2018, he has worked at Google Brain since 2013.
- Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil: American computer scientist, inventor, author, and futurist. Known for his work with optical character recognition, text-to-speech, and speech recognition. He has received 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He also engages in lectures on the future of nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology.
- Andrew Ng: Considered one of the most important researchers in AI today. Co-founder of Coursera, Google-Brain and deeplearning.ai. Associate professor of computer science at Stanford. Former chief scientist at Baidu. Awards in machine learning and robotics. Focused on free online courses.
- Sebastian Thrun: Co-founder of Udacity. Founded the Google X Lab and the team around self-driving cars at Google. Considered a leader when it comes to autonomous vehicles. Has developed several autonomous robotic systems.
Top 5 AI 100 Startups (by total funding)
Each year, venture capital database CB Insights lists the AI 100, the most promising AI startups in the world. In 2020, this list included 10 Unicorns (companies with valuations greater than one billion EUR). In addition, the AI 100 startups raised a combined $7.4 billion in funding. Strongest categories are healthcare, retail and transportation. They are followed by 12 other categories. The geographical distribution is limited to the US, Europe, China as well as 10 other countries. From a European perspective, the 8 UK stat-ups (including InstaDeep and Synk) stand out. With Twenty Billion Neurons, only one German startup made it into this list.
Aurora
Industry: Transportation; self-driving cars
Country: United States
https://aurora.tech/
The three founders Chris Urmson (“the Henry Ford of self-driving cars”), Sterling Anderson (responsible for Tesla’s Autopilot) and Drew Bagnell (one of the most respected US machine learning experts) are considered luminaries in the autonomous vehicle scene. Aurora positions itself as a technology provider and platform. The core product is Aurora Driver. From hardware to software to data services, Aurora covers the entire spectrum.
Graphcore
Industry: AI Processors
Country: Great Britain
https://www.graphcore.ai/
Bristol, U.K.-based startup Graphcore focuses on AI specialty processors called Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) to support the gigantic computing power needed for artificial intelligence. Their processors enable massive parallel processing of instructions. This has made them so successful that they are already in use at Microsoft and Dell, among others.
Lemonade
Industry: Finance & Insurance
Country: United States
https://www.lemonade.com/
Start-up Lemonade is on a mission to disrupt the insurance business model. To do so, it relies on a combination of technology and transparency. Both topics the industry is not necessarily known for. Personalized insurance policies can be purchased through an AI chatbot called Maya in the startup’s apps.
DataRobot
Industry: AI model development
Country: United States
https://www.datarobot.com/
More and more companies want to use machine learning, but are quickly reaching their limits in practice. Boston-based startup DataRobot automates the work of data scientists and helps companies build their own data models. DataRobot was ranked among America’s most promising AI companies in Forbes’ “AI 50” list. For example, computer manufacturer Lenovo uses DataRobot to predict retail demand in Brazil.
SentinelOne
Industry: Online security
Country: United States
https://www.sentinelone.com/
Mountain View, California-based startup SentinelOne specializes in AI-based threat prevention solutions. Their software is developed in Israel and is named “Singularity” — after the point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. SentinelOne’s Singularity uses machine learning to analyze attack data and derive autonomous defensive measures. Security teams can understand the sequence and cause of the threat and respond quickly.
