Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Society: There are problems in China's artificial intelligence research

In an exclusive interview with NetEase Technology, Ben Goertzel, chief scientist of Aidyia and president of the Artificial Intelligence Society, said that there are some problems in China's artificial intelligence research.

First, he found that in China, the people who understand artificial intelligence the best are young people between 25 and 30 years old, while the very authoritative professors in universities do not have many innovative ideas. This brings about a problem: young people have ideas, but they cannot get research funding. The very powerful professors have a lot of research funding, but they rarely do concrete work. In this way, the lack of financial support for good ideas is a big problem. He believes that if the abilities of young people between 25 and 30 years old can be brought into play, the situation of artificial intelligence in China will be greatly improved.

He mentioned the recent Go battle between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol. The reason why Google was able to achieve such a breakthrough was that Google formed a team of 20 people and did three years of research and development to achieve the current results, and invested a lot of money. Baidu is also researching the basic technologies used in the Go battle. Baidu has also conducted relevant research in artificial intelligence and deep learning. However, if you want to achieve the level of AlphaGo, Baidu needs to gather resources to complete it, but Baidu did not do such a thing. Baidu's engineers and developers are very smart. The reason why they did not make AlphaGo is that doing such things does not seem to make money. Google is willing to invest, so it can make something that looks cool.

Ben Goertzel said that this phenomenon is somewhat similar to China's venture capital field. American venture capitalists will indeed invest in some technological innovations that seem promising, but when he was in contact with Chinese venture capitalists, he clearly felt that Chinese venture capitalists always asked: "Do you have an APP?" They are very concerned about whether there is an APP and whether they can make money quickly, and they don't seem to be very interested in technological innovation.

In Ben Goertzel's opinion, this phenomenon may be related to the cultural and historical background of different countries. There is a phenomenon among Chinese people that when one person does something, everyone does the same thing, rather than doing different things. He analyzed that this may be related to history. For example, the United States has a very short history and is an immigrant country. Americans used to come from different countries and different races, so their backgrounds and ideas were different. However, China has a long history and emphasizes "standard answers" when doing things, so ideas tend to converge.