China's AI Advantage

Veteran researcher and investor Kai-Fu Lee believes that the US is destined to lose its lead in the Artificial Intelligence race

- Alexander Konrad

Kai-Fu Lee watched the US beat China to global internet leadership during the dotcom bubble from the inside. Now with what he sees as an even greater technological revolution taking place in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Lee doesn’t expect China to take a backseat a second time. “China started slow, and American companies went international,” Lee says during a May visit to Forbes Media’s headquarters. “But simple math says China has a larger GDP. The market will be bigger.”

When Lee talks about AI, he speaks from first-hand experience. The Taiwan native developed the first speaker-independent phone recognition programme as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon in the late 1980s, before stints at Apple and as an executive at Microsoft and Google in China—in fact, he was founding president of Google China.

Google and its peers were ultimately thwarted in their ambitions to carve out leadership stakes in the Chinese market, in part due to cultural differences among consumers as well as privacy clashes with the Chinese government. When Lee returned from working at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to launch his own VC fund, Sinovation Ventures, he came back to a China firmly entrenched in what he now describes as a duopolistic global tech economy. US internet software continued to lead the English-speaking world, while a group of Chinese companies, famously led by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (B-A-T), controlled their domestic market and exerted increasing influence in Southeast Asia and developing markets.