Fireside Chat with World-Renowned AI Expert, Kai-Fu Lee at the Hong Kong FinTech Week

well welcome back everyone I'm delighted to be here today I'm Ching Oh Rick with JPMorgan and it's my pleasure here to close out the day with our very special guest dr. Lee Chi foo so as we've been discussing here all last few days we're entering into a world that's dominated by AI and thin tech so by the year 2025 over 75 billion devices in the world will be connected to the Internet this is a remarkable number that's basically 10 devices for every person now AI spending is also surging by 2021 the annual spending will be 58 billion u.s. dollars in addition current FinTech adoption is estimated to be 33% of the global digital population will continue every year for the foreseeable future so financial institutions around the world including the firm I work for JP Morgan are investing heavily into AI and thin tech each of these numbers I just cited is very exciting and very impressive and there's no denying that both AI and thin tech are concurrently on the rise yet imagine the impact when these two can be combined so it's with great excitement that all of us here are welcoming dr. Lee Chi Phu CEO of San ovation ventures in Beijing to demystify the wonders of AI and FinTech Caillou is a world-renowned venture capitalist an expert on AI and pin tech he is the author of a best-selling book entitled AI superpowers China Silicon Valley and the New World Order San ovations ventures has about two billion dollars under management and the leading Texas the investment firm focusing on the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies prior to founding son of Asian ventures Chi foo worked for Google China he was the president for Google China he worked for Microsoft and Apple as well so in his bestseller AI superpowers chi food describes China is rapidly moving forward to become the global leader in AI and may well surpass the u.s. in the future years so thank you very much for joining us here today Caillou I will first ask you a few questions about AI and in tech and then we'll take some questions from the audience okay so first of all Caillou you've been involved in AI for some 37 years and it's hard to believe you still look so you I started when I was two I guess so you must have so please tell us how this revolutionary technology has the potential to transform the traditional world and financial services so can you please elaborate on specific changes and how soon we can expect them well as you have a job in five years as a banker no you're you're you and I are both pretty safe but the AI is in fact causing huge disruptions to many many marketplaces so let me start by quickly explaining what we mean by ai ai has many branches the most promising one is machine learning machine learning has a lot of technologies but the single one that's the big breakthrough is called deep learning and what the way deep learning works is all you have to remember is the following are one sentence when you have one single domain and a huge amount of data you can train the system to be superhuman in performance that's that's all you have to know so when you see a new opportunity just ask the question is it a single domain do you have a huge amount of data and if the answer is yes then get ready you can make a lot of money disrupt a lot of businesses or possibly have your job disrupted as well so in terms of where would we apply this the single domain capability you know in the press we've read about AI playing go diagnosing cancer winning debates and also beating humans in speech recognition and machine translation and face recognition so where does this start start and where does it stop so in my book as superpowers I talked about the four waves of AI and I'll just briefly mention them then we can go into more detail first one is internet AI because that's where you've got the most single domain huge data so the Alibaba Tencent Google Facebook are the typical beneficiaries they take advantage of all the data that we generate every day and tag and label for them so Amazon knows what you buy Google knows when you clicked on second is business AI that is banks insurance companies brokers and the hospital's government officials with all the day that they have they can turn it into making money or saving money opportunities the third one is perception AI that's where the AI can see and hear so that they can do face recognition smart speakers are conversational agents Siri Alexa but also autonomous stores that can recognize your face as well as your gestures and your intention so that all the jobs in the typical convenience store retail shop supermarket and fast-food all gone and then the fourth stage is autonomous AI this is the hardest that's where AI has to move or manipulate but when we overcome that jobs in a lot of blue-collar jobs in agriculture manufacturing will be gone jobs in commerce jobs in as I mentioned in in in fast-food chefs waiters and waitresses those will all be displaced and also autonomous vehicle that is going to be the biggest one all the drivers plus all the time we spend driving will be gone we it will become an incredibly efficient in in terms of being able to take us from place a to place B with the minimum costs so these four waves internet wave is already in at the highest point creating huge value we all use it every day business is beginning in the last maybe one or two years and FinTech is one of them will see this continue to move on over the next five to eight years but I was already here the third wave computer vision and speech we're seeing the very early beginnings but it's going to be huge and then the last wave autonomous AI is going to be a little bit longer especially autonomous driving might be five to ten years away but all of this will come in the next 10 10 years or so it sounds very exciting and you've been participating in all these exciting developments through your venture capital fund so in your fund I understand there are some 15 unicorns right it's quite a lot and five of these unicorns are specifically focused on AI and I think just in terms of the sheer number of AI unicorns in China is probably number one in the world surpassing that of the US right so can you tell us of the companies that you have invested in what is the most exciting a I driven financial application that we all should know about okay yes we're very proud to have been early stage investors in companies that have later become unicorns lots of VC say we got 10 unicorns 20 unicorns but they got in at a unicorn stage so that doesn't count I'm only telling you the ones we got in as series a maybe at a 20 million dollar valuation maybe a hundred million dollar but now is one or three or five in the largest case 15 billion dollars so very very excited about our AI successes we have I'll tell you about two companies one is a unicorn one is not the one that is is a company called fourth paradigm they build solutions for banks insurance companies and financial institutions and they have a platform called the profit platform so you basically load up you can actually have your IT department become AI enabled by importing your customer transaction records and then it has modules that will help you to do things like asset allocation credit card fraud detection targeting targeting ads at customers that have the highest conversion rates or loan default likelihood estimates so pretty much is the imagine you're a bank all the questions you might think or do insurance company so pretty much it's replacing one function at a time in the back office of a bank or insurance company and it has ambitions to be a broader company than that we think a China doesn't have much enterprise company because of habits of not paying for software or enterprise software by enterprises but we think an AI company might just be the right first entry into the enterprise then broaden and do much more than AI so we think fourth paradigm is a unicorn today but if it can also become the future of Oracle or Salesforce or sa P I think and China has a completely vacant market we're very excited about that another company I'll bring up briefly is called smart finance it's interesting because it goes the opposite way rather than helping a existing financial institution is trying to disrupt one so what it does is it makes loans to people based on not a long application but information from your phone so with your permission it will suck up information from your phone the same way Facebook and Google do and it will use that information as large number of 3,000 dimensional features to determine if they should make a loan to you so things like what apps do you use are you using gaming apps are you using some serious apps like Juhu and another one of our unicorns and and it would look at things like what's the model of your phone is it the latest iPhone or is it some really cheap phone how old is this phone and we'll use things like what day of the week is it what day of the month is it you just get paid it knows that because you told the one employer you work for it can infer the payday and they know that they have the week it would also use things that seem a little crazy like what's the battery level on your phone that actually makes a little bit of difference because you know if you have OCD and always tried to plug in your phone and recharge possibly you're likely to repay your loan if you always let your battery drain out and don't even feel responsible enough to carry a recharger with you well maybe you're a little bit less likely to pay back the loan so every little factor plays a role and altogether the default rate is down to less than icing low single digits and that is not something humans can ever do because not only is it infeasible for us to think about 3000 questions to ask an applicant but there's no way we can synthesize and make a decision and even if we could we wouldn't take the days it would take to do the manual calculations so this is why the back office jobs are either going to be gone proactively by the financial institutions or going to be disrupted by some startup like this that's a very interesting those investments sounds very exciting and also as you said I think our phones know a lot more about us than our spouse right these days I think at a more macro level in your best seller you argue that Chinese becoming AI superpower because it is storing and learning how to use big data and of course in this area the u.s. still leading right so considering the current geopolitical environment how can the two nations work together are they going to work together we earlier on in our panel talked about the two parallel universes you also talked a lot about that so will there be two internets and two ecosystems and two parallel universes dominated by US and China is this for the good or for the bad of the world okay several questions here u.s. is in this tube indisputably stronger than China in research technology prowess probably by a factor of 10 so that is the research strength that we have to recognize China is better because it's got a faster speedier tenacious entrepreneurs using much more data than us has because more data means better AI and China has more people and each person has more usage so that multiplied together gives China a very clear advantage in implementation and monetization so that's the the difference between the two countries and I think in an ideal world we as a VC would love to invest in a company that has us technology and Chinese entrepreneur and market and data but in practice the trade dispute may make that a little difficult but in that case we're still fine we're just focused on the universe in which were more familiar and just to the China part China's AI ecosystem is in fact a parallel universe as this China's mobile system and and will just continue to invest in well you know Chinese VCS invest in Chinese companies who build for Chinese customers so actually it's not a zero-sum game the gain of some Chinese AI company never comes at the expense of an American AI company but if you ask uses to have a trade war I guess we're forced to focus on Chinese companies only which we will do but not because we want to but because that's kind of the environment I agree with that CAI fool you know if you think about AI it is really a controversial topic you know Stephen Hawking once said a I could be the worst event in civilization and Elon Musk warned that you could create an immortal dictator and Bill Gates said that AI can be our friend and bringing immense new productivity so we decide to Eufaula I presume you're much more positive but is there anything that's AI related that keeps you up at night right I'm much closer to to Bill in this case but not a hundred percent okay I think you have to think about people's backgrounds when they speak we have I have huge respect for for Elon Musk as well as for the late dr. Hawking's but they with all due respect are not experts or even knowledgeable in AI they are experts in you know entrepreneurs startup or physics right they're speaking outside their domain of expertise the kind of extrapolation they make about AI becoming dominating is just not feasible one one might look at a newspaper and see an an AI breakthrough every week and say wow this is going to come so fast it's going to be a tsunami but actually on the one hand AI implementation is coming at a tsunami because each of the newspaper stories you read is an implementation story they're based on only one technology that is machine learning more specifically deep learning so when technology doesn't keep progressing exponentially then all we're seeing is lots of great companies we could invest in and make money but not that disastrous dystopian outcome that AI becomes so smart as to dominate people so with respect to this view I am adamantly against that I don't see it coming anytime soon certainly not in the next twenty years and certainly not before we see a few more pieces of evidence and breakthroughs so that I'm pretty sure however when you listen carefully to Elon Musk there are some warnings he gives are that are very very real and reasonable that is AI security one could hack autonomous vehicles more easily than one could hack PCs or phones and that could be changed turned into a dangerous um weapon of destruction ai is optimized on one goal it's a one mathematical goal right the lawmaker optimizes our lowest default rate the Amazon M optimizes our maximum revenue go alphago round up to my zit Mises on winning the most games so it optimizes one thing and we saw that as Facebook tries to optimize for the most minutes in newsfeed it causes some undesirable side effects such as using people are choosing to show people with maybe a little bit prejudicial inclinations with more content that are heavily prejudiced causing people and intentionally to become more prejudiced so that kind of site effects outside objective function kind of human beings sometimes Elon Musk talks about that I do agree those are the kinds of issues but I think the biggest issue is actually job displacement that is the one one of the reasons I wrote the book is because if you think about AI as the single domain large data super human expert that's not going to replace probably any of the jobs that people in this room because all of you are very good at multi domain processing right that's what investment banking or early stage investing is all about however there are many people out there who are doing routine single domain jobs and if you think about the human population probably easily half the people are doing work that could be replaced technically and economically by AI within the next 15 years so that probably is the biggest issue that we need to face there is a financial issue of how to pay for them there's a retraining issue there's a what new jobs might be available those are the things I talk about in my book about how to deal with that that's a very comprehensive answer kai for and you you said it very well you know AI would displace some jobs that repetitive jobs would disappear in the next few years it is also going to disrupt a lot of industries but AI does have its limits so what are the things that AI is good at what are the things that a is not good at so in terms of humans right we you know I watched one of your TED Talks and was excellent you said you know maybe AI will help restore the humanity in all of us will it I think the outcome of AI the ending of the story to AI is ours to write because it is so powerful yet it's just a tool if we choose to use it well it will end well if we choose it to use it poorly or let it fall into the hands of bad people without controls or if we give up and capitulate and say eh is gonna take over then it will end badly so part of my writing the book is to tell us that we own the responsibility to write the ending to the story because it can end well so let's come back to the first part of your question what are the jobs that AI cannot do very simply creative strategic jobs on the one side so creative jobs will be scientists writers script writers poets artists strategic would be you know CEOs M&A experts many of you in the room who can cross domains because this does the two things that I described AI can can do they're outside the domain right thinking cross domain strategically that AI cannot do creating something out of scratch AI needs to be given an objective function to optimize it cannot come up with its own objective functions so creating a new drug is not something that AI can do so these types of creative strategic jobs can be enhanced by AI but it's always human that's making the tough decisions and humans are the final person who may the entity that makes the call there is another large number of jobs that will become available to people who might lose their routine jobs and these jobs are the ones with compassion when I say compassion I actually mean compassion empathy warmth where the human human connection is essential and that the human to human trust enhances the experience so you can think of this as a psychiatrist social worker doctor teacher masseuse bartender you can think about this as nanny elderly caretaker nurses so there are actually a large number of things within this domain and I would argue that over the last two centuries we saw the largest job migration from agriculture to manufacturing and in the next two decades we will see the largest job migration from the routine to the empathetic welcome routine too empathetic NASM really I need him all over that for a little bit a trifle but what if AI decides one day it doesn't need humans anymore will it happen and if it does what happens to humans well I can try to cover both answers I'm a firm believer that this is so far out that because over the last 62 years of AI history there's only been one breakthrough which was deep learning 10 years ago and since then there has been no other breakthroughs to get to the stage where AI writes his own destiny and and learns to want to have the desire of controlling things and maybe even controlling people that's going to require probably 20 breakthroughs so we only have one breakthrough if I started seeing to a year three a year five a year I'll start to get worried but at the current pace I think we're nowhere and there that possibility now having said that I have talked to a number of very smart people who don't agree with me I think they are in the minority but there are a few of them and they're really really smart people at deepmind people that open AI all very smart when I talk to them I think their belief is that their belief is that that they will come it's hard to project when it will come but here's what we need to do as researchers that's speaking for them because I don't believe what they say we as researchers should find out a way to train a AI to be consistent with human objectives and it's kind of a human AI shared future so AI needs to be trained with every decision they make with the well-being of human in mind whether that is kindness protection or betterment of human beings those are this kind of directions they're talking about I personally think it's um extremely unlikely and very abstract but I thought I would share what these really smart people think to well that sounds like utopia AI and humans coexisting we're capitalizing on AI but not being controlled by it that sounds wonderful I hope that's a case in the future years well the other hope is that we never get there which is I think the more likely case is that people keep trying but AIS continues to be our tool and in that case it's a much more controllable future and that's the future that I believe we'll end up with ya know also okay so I'm taking a lot of questions on the iPad here too as a banker I'm interested in knowing when you choose to invest in the company you don't know whether it's gonna become a unicorn or not what are your criteria for investing in a potential unicorn and also on the exit side when do you decide to exit an unicorn okay ai are in general in general I think you have a lot of successful AI investments as your area of expertise but you can talk broadly about technology okay yeah actually first I would say there is multiple formulas of success because there are many good early stage investors in China and US and each one has a different style so I'll just answer this not as the definitive answer but with what we do we consider ourselves a tech VC so first and foremost we understand technology and we predict technology trends when we see a technology trend or tsunami coming we make a lot of investments when we see a good direction generally the trend is coming it's not a zero-sum game it's a new thing and we can predict it and we know something others don't we quietly invest in as many good entrepreneurs as we can and that's what we did in AI the five unicorns were not made in the last two years during the AI hype they were invested well before most people knew what a I was so that's kind of our tech VC secrets the other thing of course we will look at the entrepreneur we think that Chinese entrepreneur we look for someone to be one in addition to all the things you would want right smart knowledgeable integrity and things like that but we in particular in China we look for someone to be an incredible leader because in China the startups are usually a large percentage of the shares are owned by the one single founder so he or she needs to shoulder all the responsibility risks downside and upside so that person has to be someone that people will and want to follow and that's incredibly important secondly we look for that person to be very thorough because no employee would follow a start-up entrepreneur who doesn't know the details of how the market the company and the competition works and especially in early stages later stages may be different for early stages they gotta roll up their sleeves work with their people and then understand thoroughly this industry this company this competition and when we talk to them we look to learn something from them not to teach them something so the and very strong also in execution orientation these two I think the strong leadership and then the hands-on execution style are the most important things and of course because we're a tech VC we'll make sure they're technically competent they're not just you know sugar-coated AI company but the real one and and that and then their actual product idea we care about but we also understand early-stage companies pivot and they may end up with a different idea than the one they came to us with so we like that idea to be sound but we don't insist it's perfect we understand it may be changed excellent excellent answer kai food and lots of questions from the audience here very quickly how will China's social credit score change financial services in the country I don't actually know too much about a social score no one in mainland China actually knows too much about the social score the only answer I got from a government official was that think of it as a government run Equifax and I think a lot of Western press have based on their own sources extrapolated that to mean a lot of things but based on what we could see is kind of an early thing are not public are not displayed like a lot that people think and it's largely oriented as far as I know on financial transactions great more questions from the audience most successful tech companies are invested in by be 80 in China what are the next big ideas that can compete with Alibaba or 10 cent well I think Alibaba in 10 cents have been amazingly successful not only in their products but in their investment and we have huge admiration and and fear for them however not too much fear for us because we're early stage in their late stage I think it may be difficult we would have much more concerned if we were a late stage investor because it's hard to compete with them early stage we have our advantages but in terms of an entrepreneur I don't think their advantages can be carried to every domain clearly if you want to work on the internet mobile you got to think about in Chinese is called Abu Dhabi you know grab their thighs and get their money and let them take you where you they want to take you so we can share the upside but if you're not in the mobile internet business I think there are lots of areas where they are not either not interested in not competent in not knowledgeable in or think it's too small for example in many of the companies we fund in AI you know when we started face recognition they thought this was just some silly stuff but now that it's big it's actually been difficult Baidu Alibaba intense and all have decent face recognition algorithms but they can't seem to come in and beat the three incumbents that are start that were startups one of which we funded so that that's that's kind of an example face recognition is not in that domain that it's used is not directly related to mobile and you can extrapolate and say well of all the traditional industries how many do they really have their tentacles in and how many really do they really control or can influence things like real estate or manufacturing or transportation or retail or banking it's unclear that they have that much prowess so a lot of our new investments whether it's AI or not or education actually that's another one about big success areas with the VIP kid as our biggest example in all of these areas I would argue that they have modest amount of leverage so that we can still build giant companies in these new in these traditional fields as they are disrupted by AI or other technologies and not be worried that we'll be squashed by Alibaba retention great great we'll keep on taking more questions send them through I'm combining some of the questions to save time so in terms of how AI blockchain can shape the new economy tell us how they can shape the world going forward but also for all of us here how can each and every one of us better prepare for an AI world okay I think first I don't think blockchain is that the same preparedness maturity as AI it may be where AI was five years ago it might end up being something equally great as AI or it might up end up with something much smaller that determined that's determined by how many killer apps are found for blockchain AI has gone well beyond that stage AI has created so many multi ten billion dollar companies with the single killer app the internet right Baidu Alibaba Tencent Google Facebook Amazon total kaizo app in dodo all of them have AI behind without that they wouldn't be what they are so blockchain needs to find that in order to claim an equal seat at the table with AI so I know many of you love blockchain here but I think we just have to be honest and evaluate technologies at the technology stage now to answer the second part of the question how do we prepare for the future AI world I think first is think about the job you do how can you do something great with AI as a tool I think in finance in investing AI as a tool is going to be the best thing you could get because AI is quantitative requires data you have data financial areas are full of data generally validated generally well labeled and you have goals your goals are numerical in nature and an objective and can be trained for AI to do almost every decision made in your companies our quantitative data driven so therefore they're very very suitable for AI to do so be thinking about AI tools that exist if you're a large firm build your own team build your own tools if you're a traditional company that doesn't have technology think about you buying software from like our fourth paradigm or some such company that can assist understand who has technologies that can help you also AI power of entries coming down so in many areas of big data AI you can probably hire really smart programmers and have them learn AI on their own it's not for autonomous driving but for numerical transaction so you got have embraced that the second thing is you got to be aware about the disruptors I don't know if you've seen a State Farm in commercial if you haven't look it up it's very funny because they were mocking a start-up insurance ai company called lemonade but they did it in such a poor way and there's such a giant and they're mocking is such a tiny startup it ended up giving huge visibility to the AI startup and that shows the fear in the traditional company and I think you should not be overcome by fear because AI can be your friend if you think about AI as the this tool that will only be used by the startup disrupter that wants to eat your business you want to squash them what that's not going to happen because it's AI that's going to take over everything so you are better off losing some short-term profit switching to an AI model eat your own lunch before you're at lunch gets eaten sorry to be so direct and blunt and then one other question when the final point is about a eye disruption on jobs it will hit a lot of the financial industries it has just only begun we've seen City give warning for its back office obviously not for the M&A deal making Investment Banking VCS these are all fine but for secondary securities trading for back-office type of decisions any decision that's single domain I can single domain large quantitative objective driven decision well it's going to have a job potential impact so if you're in that job or if you have employees in that job be thinking about how you would automate that they'll also be humanistic and think about how you would help your employees transition into another job either in your company or gaining a skill set that we earlier talked about as not a I display scible that sounds very good very good advice our CAI fool lots of questions on AI regulation I think AI regulation is still in its nation C right so should countries have agreed on some sort of regulatory framework also should country sign some treaties to prevent AI from being used in weaponry and warfare yes I think AI will need to face regulation but I think the first step is not to regulate general AI because we don't understand it enough I think the first step is to regulate within each industry for example the Securities Agency configure can decide well how a I trading should work transportation agency can determine how autonomous vehicle should work the Department of Labor can decide how displacement should happen at cetera so I think we have existing laws to make up a new law around the new technology is really strange it's like there was never an internet law right it's really how Internet is used within commerce how Internet is used within some other aspect so I would say first within the jurisdiction of each department think about how it would regulate use of AI within existing framework rather than try to break out and come up with some new rule because if you do a very high-level new rule you're bound to be wrong you're up to the gdpr I think it is terrible terrible basically it changes the product manager job to one Co owned by the government and the individual consumer you can imagine how poor a job a government or an individual consumer can do every website you go to you have to click yes yes yes yes yes but however I do think you is doing a global service because by doing such a bad job they wake us up into thinking well what are the things we can do because privacy is not letting each user decide every website and advertiser that is the dumbest thing you can imagine the to regulate right privacy is a complex issue it is a it is a trade-off between privacy and convenience there needs to be a knob we have right I mean I look at my phone and I'm 56 percent of my time is in WeChat so we chat has all my data but I'm more than willing to give WeChat my data including some data I probably shouldn't give it but because it gives me so much convenience I give up right so that's a decision I'm willingly making and people should be willing to make those able to have that little knob and and then there is the privacy for security right all of us are happy to let airports have all the cameras everywhere because we know that lowers the likelihood of hijacking that's worth therefore almost all of us right and then there is some privacy for social good I have been the cancer patient I would love to donate my data to anyone who wants to use it for AI met coal research but us has these HIPAA HIPAA rules that doesn't allow researchers from getting my data so not only our regulation is not helping the knob to happen but also blocking it so I think we need more humanely understandable knobs of privacy versus convenience privacy versus security privacy versus social good so we can each dial our own knob and the process of figuring that out will take some time it's um and I think gdpr is is doing a good thing by trying out a bad product so other countries hopefully will build a good product great Thank You Kai for since we're in tech week in Hong Kong do you care to say a few words about Hong Kong which is a leading global financial center of course but in some ways it is lagging behind mainland China in terms of FinTech so how can honk on leverage the strengths and developments in AI and FinTech in mainland China maybe also say a few words about the greater Bay Area where we are now you know 9 cities in Guangdong plus Hong Kong Macau a very vibrant tech cluster so to speak you know one GDP will be 1.4 trillion US dollars much larger than the San Francisco Bay Area population about 70 million versus 7 million in the San Francisco Bay Area so Hong Kong in the broader context of Greater China and also the greater Bay Area okay sure I'm a huge fan of Hong Kong I think the financial services are among the best in the world some of the best minds in finance like Jing are located here and some of the many of the Asia has in Greater China has and their organizations and smart people they're drawn it draws great talent in finance and furthermore I think the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has done great things under li Xiao Tian I think he's been really great in pushing through the stock exchange regulations that makes it more suitable as a tech market I think Hong Kong is destined to become the one of the Nasdaq's of the world I mean it not in the size but in the attraction for a tech company right I think Hong Kong's attraction for tech companies will surely go up given the changes that have gone on in Hong Kong stock exchange at the same time I would caution that investment is not one profession just like jeans profession and mine are very very different I don't think we can easily exchange jobs and do a good job the early stage investment is a very very different thing from a PE or investment bank and and I think that that clustering and expertise still needs to be attracted similarly I think Hong Kong engineers and graduates are fantastic see Hong Kong schools are great I won't name them all you know which they are four or five really top schools or graduates are very much sought-after throughout the world but you got the engineers where are your entrepreneurs China where's your Wang Ching where is your tongue way right I think that may be difficult to produce given the population and relatively financial comfortable environment and a vibrant middle class that exists in Hong Kong so I would say some method to import a few great entrepreneurs from China to live in Hong Kong so bring the good the top VCS and entrepreneurs to Hong Kong to bootstrap and grow if you look at how China did it it actually imported a bunch of them if you look at robin Leach how strong if you look at the early investors neo Shen or Hugo shown they were overseas brought back to become the seeds Hong Kong needs those seeds in the early stages the greater Bay Area I'm also a big fan of because it addresses a lot of the points I bring up with's engines capabilities in manufacturing and entrepreneurship and VCS that's really great Guangzhou is also very very forward-looking I was just at home and even Ullman is on our progressing greatly almond University I was very impressed today so I think that's good however when we compare with the Bay Area we need to be a little cautious because when you actually go to the Bay Area and we go to San Francisco and say Oh Silicon Valley is great and we love it and the person from San Francisco will say we're not in Silicon Valley this is not the Bay Area so even in a distance of 40 minutes it creates a inconvenience that makes it hard to melt to melt together so as Bay Area faces all those aspirations I think it i think the the distance is still significant and also having to go through customs and things like that adds to that so how to further integrate such a large region so that it's truly a region looking at how even the California Bay a Silicon Valley isn't quite a region it's like two regions maybe three with East Bay in the in the US so how to further integrate with transportation video conferencing ease of customs and things like that will be even more helpful that's great careful you know we're quickly running out of time in the last several weeks I've been following you on WeChat on YouTube you've been traveling the world educating the world about AI I must say you have really perfected the art of public speaking and the amazing thing is you know you're from coast-to-coast one day you knew you're the next day you're in Seattle San Francisco then you're back in Chicago you're back at Carnegie Mellon it's just remarkable what you do I firmly believe what you have done personally traveling the world marketing your book I'm really marketing your expertise and knowledge and really enlightening the world on AI the effort is it's remarkable and its unparalleled so we are very grateful for your presence here so I want to perhaps end with what Bill Gates said you said earlier that you actually agree with Bill Gates when he said AI can be our friend and let's hope that's the case and I also want to say hi foo you've been so hard-working you said the Chinese entrepreneurs are unique in that they're hardworking they're tenacious they never give up and you are the best embodiment of entrepreneurship so I'm very much admirer and fan of your work and I'm really proud to call you my friend thank you so thank you very much Chi for for joining us and thank you very very much [Music]

Channel: Hong Kong FinTech Week

Views: 15,054

Keywords: hkfintechweek, fintech, ai, artificial intelligence, hong kong, kai-fu lee

Id: 3PlyUUdVlb4

Length: 46min 39sec (2799 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018