Understanding Artificial Intelligence

uh thank you uh thank you so very much to invite me to this wonderful event and what i want to talk about today is where why is it that u.s and china lead technologically and why is it that britain being one of the world's greatest countries with so many brilliant researchers and research hasn't yet been the third great superpower and what might one consider to develop in terms of policy ecosystem technologies to propel britain forward i'm admittedly not an expert on the uk but what i can do is share success stories rather than sharing stories from us which i'm quite familiar since i grew up in the u.s i will focus on china because i think that's the aspect that many in the audience perhaps have not been exposed to so we all know ai is really making headlines every month we see new things that ai is doing in terms of game playing medical protein folding and recognizing objects now in reading comprehension really beating people in almost every imaginable single dimensional task and about four and five years ago i wrote the book ai superpowers in which i predicted that a china would catch up with the us as the right hand shows over the next five years and that's exactly what has happened and the reason i was able to make those predictions was i saw i was in china watching the tremendous ability to catch up with technologies and that china didn't do as great research as us or uk but it was so fast in implementation and there were tenacious entrepreneurs in a powerful ecosystem second only to the silicon valley and also a tremendous capital market of course most importantly a huge market with a huge data set and for ai data is all critical so what has happened in the last few years is that just from my company side of asian ventures we have created not one not two but ten ai unicorns in almost most imaginable spaces from healthcare to autonomous vehicles to chips to drones to computer vision to speech recognition etc so we have participated in creation of these companies and in doing so we learned a lot about what it is that is inherent to china's success and later i'll talk about which ones might be applicable to britain china continues to do a lot of things a lot of r d budget a lot of government policies pwc and mckenzie predicts china will be the largest ai market china and u.s have by far the largest number of aeon unicorns i know uk i think ranks now number three but the numbers are still much smaller by order of magnitude compared to the u.s and china so lots of still opportunities in the future so that was four years ago this year i published a new book called ai 2041. i'm not going to go into the book but the key points in the book is about ai is one of the core technologies but not the only one the point that i make is that we are the very important point in history the last such important point was 120 years ago when electricity electromagnetic wave and combustible engine changed the world and they combined for example you know radio wave um and electricity allowed for uh in the world war ii uh encryption and decryption and the creation in this country of the enigma computer led to the computer industry followed by communications by the internet really changed the world as we know it and going forward we're about to witness a revolution even bigger because we're looking at in electricity level innovations that not one but at least five maybe ten and these five would include things like artificial intelligence beating human in almost everything automation especially industrial taking away 50 of human jobs but also liberating us from having to do routine work uh new energy having dropped 85 to 90 percent in cost over the last 15 years and the same will happen bringing down the cost of energy to almost zero and when we produce products in the future the cost of goods really involve the materials which will be naturally made within synthetic biology the energy will be with much lower cost solar plus new forms of battery power perhaps hydrogen perhaps others and also the labor cost will go away because robots will take over so we're witnessing the possibility that we as a human race at least possess together the sufficient capability to bring down the cost of goods to eradicate poverty and hunger and moving on to quantum which is trillions of times faster than today's computer and can solve problems that were previously declared completely unsolvable in human history using classical computers we'll soon be referring to the computers we have as classical computers because these quantum computers are so much more powerful so much faster and they require all brand new software and and lastly life sciences is really allowing us humans to in some sense play god in creating life using synthetic biology in editing life using genetic sequencing multi-omics genetic editing and these technologies also are fundamentally digital in nature so that data sciences and digital technologies and ai will apply and the most powerful thing is that these five to five things will play with each other and crisscross and build even more powerful things for example you can imagine using ai to create robots that will make batteries in a way that will disrupt the future of automotive industry and there are so many such examples and of course there must be people in the audience like herman who would say hey you missed metaverse and there will be people who say you miss web3 you miss blockchain so that all points to the fact that there are not three but five or eight or ten technologies that will change the world not just create value and companies and disrupt industries but crisscross and intersect to create combined experiences and changes to our economy our society in ways that are not imaginable this is not just a sector of computing of investment this is the future of investment and that's the essence of the book and the geopolitical summary would be that if the second industrial revolution 120 years ago was what made it possible for u.s to surpass uk and become the technology superpower that u.s did not invent all those technologies i realized that europeans and uk invented a lot of them but u.s perfected them right electricity electromagnetic waves and combustible engine through companies like general electric ford that we all know about at t and so on so china is poised to potentially do that with this set of eight to ten technologies of course u.s is the de facto and default leader in these spaces but china through ai has proven itself to be able to integrate engine out integrate out engineer out produce and out monetize the americans in the ai space and the same may happen i would say may because it's not yet been demonstrated in these other technologies so i think the chinese government and the chinese people see this as a phenomenal opportunity for china to become a technology superpower perhaps in the duopoly perhaps in the leadership position or number put to position in this from a chinese perspective china had been the wealthiest country in the world for most of the last few thousand years until it missed the first industrial revolution and became a third world country and the chinese leaders understandably we'll never want that to happen again and miss another technological revolution so the government is playing a very strong role into ensuring that china has a seat at the table at this fourth industrial revolution so on to uk so if silver and gold are likely to be taken by u.s and china who will win the bronze i think uk has high prospects but there are clear strengths and challenges and weaknesses that uk clearly has the best researchers um perhaps in the world certainly on a per capita basis but even an absolute basis a very strong number three and the best vc environment in europe but also that to realize that still much smaller and much weaker than u.s and china the challenges would be how to catch up with these two giants um policies may be a challenge or maybe an opportunity and also keeping the talent all the talent that's brilliant coming out of oxford cambridge ucl imperial college um well the reality is they work for american companies today and they're generating value for them where is the british industry right these are some of the challenges so if we look at china and u.s sorry this slide is a little misleading china and u.s is a view of today uk is what i think can be i wouldn't say it's quite there yet so looking at technical technological policy i call us weak but i don't mean in a negative way i just mean it's u.s believing hands off china is very pro-tech very strong policies uk can't consider that secondly the market u.s is big china is bigger and has more bigger market big data uk i think needs to recognize that uk is a small market relatively speaking so it must go for bigger markets in terms of technology it's important to realize u.s and uk lead in advanced research but china has the strongest most efficient development what can be learned from there in terms of talents this is where i think u.s has the best position because the whole world wants to go to american schools most of the whole world for re and then they stay there china is in the catch up state but it has many young engineers now uk i think produces great phds but how to retain them to work for you british companies and then lastly in investment i think u.s believes that hands off let the private industry take care of it china plays more of a public plus private approach and i'll talk about that and that might be something to consider so my suggestion is that the uk might consider say a third column like that one which combines the best of us and chinese approaches so what can be learned from china i won't talk about u.s because you all know that pretty well china in terms of chinese policies what is not printed in the press because it tends to be a little negative when it comes to china nowadays but here's one thing that's not in the press that i want to tell you about is what's called the little giant program lower little giants program on the lower left china has a list of little giants in technology to which it subsidizes on the national provincial and city level 156 billion dollars and and that's a huge amount of money because this is a technology subsidy this is not investment this is for no stake in the company merely when the government sees hey we see the fourth industrial revolution coming these technologies are going to intersect and play we want to lead here's a bunch of money to capable people on the little giants list who are proven technologists with real differentiated technologies and patents we want them to have this money to bootstrap their company or to grow build their semiconductor plant or to build their quantum computer and then on the right hand side even two new stock exchanges that only deep tech companies can be listed so you can see the effort that's being put in china now i know many americans will say subsidies don't work and look what happened with president obama and solyndra but i would say that's more of a fact of short-term thinking when you pick the right technology you can't also be right in the time frame here's an example where china missed the time frame but subsidized the technologies and created the brain trust and that eventually led to chinese leadership on the left hand side you see china is by far the leader in solar panels and that began with subsidies about 15 years ago led to tremendous number of failures and bankruptcies basically a disaster from the american standpoint but the brain trust remained and the as solar panel became price effective chinese these entrepreneurs and technologies jumped in and took over eight of the top ten solar panels in the world on the right hand side is battery similar story except catl took that subsidy built the world's best battery company the previous speaker talked about tesla being great in battery that may be the case for an automobile company but a real battery company the world leader is clearly catl tesla uses primarily catl they're the largest company with new technology investments and even more interestingly working on a cell to chassis solution that essentially makes the chassis of the car a battery reducing the parts the weight the cost and of the car and letting it drive a thousand kilometers per charge second key point beyond tech government policy is how do you invest in a deep tech company we at sign ovation we are technologists we have 15 phds on my team what is important to know is what has worked for vc in internet companies won't work in deep tech in internet companies one might find a great tenacious entrepreneur give him or her a lot of money become a monopoly like google facebook or tencent alibaba then laugh all the way to the bank but that won't work that won't work in deep tech you can't give a synthetic biology researcher a lot of money and kill all the synthetic biology researchers they all go after different things you have to deeply understand technology speak the language of technology and business intersect and help coach the phd become a good ceo or find another ceo that's what we do as innovation and at the future opportunity i'd love to share more details about that so in summary i think what uk can do is really first think about subsidies as something that could work uh second and selectively pick them because you don't have an infinite budget secondly really bet on top uk funds and bring global funds from us china other places to come over third think about global and day one because your market is relatively small and number four realize you need a different breed of vcs and we'll be happy to share our playbook and number five is enhance the pull factor so that british talent remain and finally think about the opportunities to work with both u.s and china thank you very much you

Channel: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

Views: 6,514

Keywords: Tony;, Blair;, Institute;, Foundation;, TBI;, future of britain, conference, Kai-Fu Lee, AI, Artificial Intelligence, technology

Id: GNcMwSVGzk8

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022