Perry…said other nations are making deep investments in the pursuit of AI supremacy. “I promise you the Chinese and the Russians are spending massive amount of money,” he said. “The focus they have on this, there is no doubt who the competition is here.”
From the article “Rick Perry and Breaking Down Hope Vs Hype at The AI Summit” on InformationWeek.
Politics aside (and there are plenty of political reasons for Rick Perry to be saying all of this), he’s right that China and Russia are major competitors in the race to dominate the AI market.
AI is expected to grow 36% annually through 2027 (Source: MarketWatch) which makes it a source of both financial and technological power that competing nations are unlikely to overlook.
But securing dominance in the AI space takes more than rhetoric. And it’s not something that we can just mandate as a nation. Developing AI technology can be encouraged -but shouldn’t be directed- by governments, which makes it difficult for them to win in displays of superiority.
Perry’s comments may have been more posturing against China than anything, but they demonstrate the current administration’s growing obsession with technology as a front line in their global economic showdown.
Yet this oversimplifies the challenges entangled with actually applying artificial intelligence in real world scenarios.
“AI is not magic. It’s just math.” — Finding means, medians, and standard deviations in data can provide value, he said. Train employees what a correlation coefficient is, how to interrogate data, and how to look at outliers.
We have a long way to go until any nation is “dominant in AI” and we probably stand to gain more by cooperation than competition at this point.
For more on the AI summit read the original article at InformationWeek.
