The fifth edition of the Wuzhen expo, dedicated to the digital economy, took place in China. A place where all the major global players show the latest news to the public. Too bad that this time the Americans did not participate, the competition in the sector was too strong. The US fear of overtaking China is too strong. Washington sees Chinese dynamism as a threat to national security, so much so that it is trying to boycott Huawei devices around the world, suspected of being a means of the Chinese government to spy on Western societies. However, the Wunzhen expo was a great opportunity for Huawei to expose the news on the super fast network to the public.
Aside from Qualcomm, writes Business and Finance, no American big tech has sent senior executives. Walking around the stands it is clear the main theme of the exhibition, artificial intelligence. Very few apps, few robots, the stands of companies, small, medium or large, are a collection of screens where data and processing of all kinds are displayed, from real-time monitoring of city traffic to recognizing a face in the crowd. One after another all the big names in Chinese industry have disciplinedly distributed the various "niches" of Artificial Intelligence. Alibaba has taken over the connected cities. Robin Li's Baidu has been working on autonomous driving for many years with the Apollo project. New billionaire startups such as iFlytek and SenseTime, founded by two former researchers, are at the top in voice recognition and image recognition, also thanks to the two billion image database that the Chinese government has made available.
Yes, because data is everything, they are the core business of this new economy, algorithms need it to become more and more intelligent. Speaking of data, China is light years ahead of the US and Europe. With over 1 billion and a half of population and with little stringent rules on privacy, it manages to have a myriad of useful data for the new systems.
In China, so the robot machines are everywhere. In Shenzhen, for example, they experience a traffic management system with digital eyes and a cloud brain. In another city, a new social rating system is tested, which will assess the "merit" of each citizen on the basis of all the traces he leaves online. "I believe that China will soon reach or even surpass the United States in the development and application of artificial intelligence," says Kai-Fu Lee, scientist and investor who has lived and knows the American reality well.