‘AI Farms’ Are at the Forefront of China’s Global Ambitions
Yin You doesn’t look like a key strategic asset. He weighs a little over 100 pounds, has auburn dyed hair, and wears a hoodie emblazoned with the words “Dope Shit.” But in China’s rise to superpower status, the 20-year-old student is a foot soldier playing a vital role.
Yin works at Bainiaohe Digital Town, a tech hub set deep in the tree-covered hills of China’s southwestern province of Guizhou. The region is traditionally known for growing tea and producing fiery Moutai liquor, but today it’s luring Yin, and hundreds of young Chinese like him, to work in the booming sector of Artificial Intelligence or AI.
For eight hours each day, they sit at computer terminals on brightly colored swivel chairs and help refine the reliability of facial and voice recognition software, driverless car programs, and even mobile apps that are used to identify plants and insects.
“I used to think of AI as what’s in American sci-fi movies—many robots and Star Wars,” says Yin. “AI right now is nowhere near that level. It needs to learn. My job here is to teach it.”
He does that by highlighting objects in images on his computer monitor. To help a self-driving car algorithm learn to identify common features of a city street, for example, Yin clicks on endless images of buses, sidewalks, or pedestrians. To assist voice recognition software, he’ll listen to garbled human pronunciations and input the correct meaning. It’s a thankless, repetitive job.
“AI is only as intelligent as the labor you put in,” says Hu Dingxiang, project manager for Mengdong Technology Ltd., the Beijing-founded firm where Yin works.
As China’s economy slows and rising wages make manufacturing less competitive, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is turning to technology to arrest the slide. Strategic technologies such as AI are a key focus. President Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 plan aims to ensure that China dominates AI as well as other high-tech industries, such as aeronautics and microchips.
Last year, China’s State Council issued the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to establish China as the “premier global AI innovation center” by 2030, when it predicts that China’s core AI industry will be worth $148 billion, with AI-related fields ten times that.
With Beijing and Washington sparring over cybersecurity, trade and myriad other issues, this has huge strategic implications. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin said whoever leads in AI “will become ruler of the world.”
According to Adam Segal, director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, the “significant economic and national security implications … are why Beijing is so driven to be a major player in AI.”
It’s a mission that has seeped down through Chinese society. China’s first dedicated AI school opened in September. An AI textbook series designed for primary and secondary students is expected to hit classrooms this year. In the future, the hope is that gleaming “AI Farms” like Mengdong’s will replace the nation’s polluting factories.
“Just like the Middle East has lots of oil, China can be the world’s center for AI data,” says Sheng Hua, CEO of Mengdong, whose clients include Chinese tech titans Baidu, JD.com and Alibaba.
AI farms are well suited to impoverished regions like Guizhou, where land and labor are cheap and the climate temperate enough to enable the running of large machines without expensive cooling systems. It takes only two days to train workers like Yin in basic AI tagging, or a week for the more complicated task of labeling 3D pictures.
“Thanks to cheap labor, which only costs a tenth of what our overseas competitors must pay, we have a big advantage,” says Hu. “The U.S. cannot compete with China when it comes to cheap labor.
