Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/11/2-87b-to-140-7m.html
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So, if I’m reading this right, they overspent on all the major factors and didn’t allow enough time for the creation of the industry pros necessary? China. . .succeeded itself into failure?
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Why build expensive artificial stupidity when actual intielligent humans are cheap?
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Many of the early promising AI demos have fizzled or turned out to be smoke-and-mirrors
This is likely coming to the US tech sector as well…
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Somewhere in BB’s past is a post equating current AI to stage magic. AI works in absolutely perfect conditions, viewed from the correct angle, Otherwise it falls apart. There’s another old BB post on hyped technologies that evaporate or never arrive. Working language recognition has been “a decade away” for almost a half-century now, same as commercial fusion.
So what if current AIs outperform radiologists in medical image analysis? They can’t read maps or music scores.
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Last few times I was in China, both locals and foreigners had grim outlooks on the economy in China. Not a recession, but lot of signs of belt tightening and uncertainty. If reality mirrors my anecdotal evidence, it’s no surprise higher risk and longer term investments are drying up.
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Given the enthusiastic application of tech to the Uyghurs; I suspect some optimism about the…superior ideological reliability…of robotic agents.
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When the official figures are as “enhanced” as they are in the PRC, then I think we’ll never see an actual recession declared, but a write-down in valuations like this could well be a sign opf things not going well in the chinese economy.
And since it’s 30 years since nothing in particular, expect any bad economic news to be very swiftly memory-holed.
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Isn’t that exactly what we want? Save the boring stuff for the AIs and let the humans do the fun stuff.
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I’d rather have AIs read maps and scores for me. Tablatures too. My eyes are shot. Fun stuff? That’s improvisation.
Mea culpa: I started playing with proto-AIs back in Eliza’s day and worked my way up to Prolog decision systems. Wrote some robotics code, too, and basic neural nets. Very primitive. I have zero idea if sturdy AI is possible. We’ll see.
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Even slow growth is terrifying to a lot of Chinese. The amount of debt leveraging in China is staggering. What I think is happening to a lot of people is the equivalent of keeping your job and expecting your usual Christmas bonus, but finding you’re getting jelly of the month this year.
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Have I misunderstood?
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This seems like an interesting tidbit more for ‘AI’ than for China specifically.
Historically a lot of computer science was something that didn’t actually need all that much ‘computer’. Sure, being able to implement professor somebody’s algorithm at useful speed in silicon kept it from being purely a math department curiosity; but large areas of computer science were mostly open to people whose semiconductor supply was pretty tepid.
Russia and some of the former Soviet republics ended up being fairly dramatic examples: strong math grounding turned into an ongoing reputation for CS and software despite gross industrial deficiencies that left them(even with ample industrial espionage) pitifully undersupplied with actual computing gear.
It says something about ‘AI’, or at least about how we are approaching it, that a country that is(relatively) buried in compute widgets(indigenous product is mostly tepid, ARM SoCs and nationalist MIPS attempts; but it exists; and favors the one who works in parallel; while the scale of manufacture for clients world-wide means that there can be minimal meaningful restriction on access to even top shelf silicon, aside from price; it’s not like Xeons and GPUs are kept out of the country) is having ‘AI’ problems in part due to compute undersupply.
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The dragon stumbles…
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I see what you did there! 
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exposed a talent shortfall of more than 400,000 employees.
I don’t get it, can’t they just fill those positions with AI’s?
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