AI: Accelerated Innovation

Any credible list of influential books about tech from the last decade would include AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee.

- Rich Karlgaard

Considered the world’s foremost authority on artificial intelligence, Taipei-born Lee got an early start, writing a pioneering speech-recognition program while a student at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s. He later had a career in China and the U.S. at Apple, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics and Google, where he was president of Google China. Now based in Beijing, Lee runs a venture capital firm called Sinovation, which focuses on AI investments. The interview with Lee took place (virtually) in early October.

Forbes Asia: AI Superpowers made you a global business star. Why did you write the book?

Kai-Fu Lee: China has—thanks to data, AI, and the entrepreneur ecosystem—rapidly evolved from a copycat into a true innovator. It currently co-leads artificial intelligence with the United States. When AI Superpowers came out in 2018, I think it was a bit surprising to people.

What has surprised you most in the three years since you wrote AI Superpowers?

Probably, the big surprise is that AI innovation is even faster than I thought. By that I mean the speed at which AI innovation goes from research to products. Everyone knew that was going faster, but it is even faster now. As an example, computer vision algorithms and convolutional neural networks took 30 years from the first research paper to eventually becoming a pervasively used technology. Contrast that with the more recent natural language breakthroughs. Google published an academic paper on the subject, and in just two years just about every commercial company has it in their products. This makes us even more confident that the quick adoption of AI into all kinds of domains and countries will reach commercial applications much faster than just about any other technology we can imagine.