83 min listen
Inside China's AI Ecosystem: A View From Beijing
From"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Inside China's AI Ecosystem: A View From Beijing
From"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
ratings:
Length:
96 minutes
Released:
Apr 10, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In this episode, we explore the Chinese AI ecosystem with 'L-squared,' an anonymous tech worker based in Beijing. We discuss major players, model quality, public engagement, regulation, and the US 'chip ban.' Discover the similarities and differences between US and Chinese AI landscapes, and gain a nuanced perspective on the current state of AI in China.
USEFUL RESOURCES:
Testing Chinese models: Yi-34B-Chat (made by Kai-Fu Lee's team 01.AI) can be tried out via Replicate (https://replicate.com/01-ai/yi-34b-chat) or Hugging Face. You can also use the ChatGLM playground (https://open.bigmodel.cn/trialcenter) and Baidu's ERNIE (https://yiyan.baidu.com/) without a Chinese SIM card.
Benchmarking models: SuperCLUE is one of the most prominent benchmarks - the latest results are on GitHub (https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/SuperCLUE) and the paper explaining the methodology is here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15020).
Regulation: Explainer (https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/07/10/china-s-ai-regulations-and-how-they-get-made-pub-90117) from Matt Sheehan; piece (https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-tight-ai-regs-hurt-chinese-firms) on how genAI regs are affecting Chinese companies.
US-China competition: Jeff Ding's work (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2173633) on the diffusion deficit in S&T; Bloomberg piece (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-china-huawei-semiconductor/) on Huawei's semiconductor development efforts.
Staying up to date: Sign up to alerts from CSET's Scout tool (https://scout.eto.tech/); subscribe to Concordia AI's AI safety (https://aisafetychina.substack.com/) in China newsletter (disclaimer: I used to work at Concordia!)
A 2016 profile (https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-37-happy-20th-anniversary) on Microsoft Research Asia by Wang Jingjing, covered in Jeff Ding's ChinAI newsletter
SPONSORS:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, instead of...does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off http://www.omneky.com/
The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR
Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to choosesquad.com and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.
Plumb is a no-code AI app builder designed for product teams who care about quality and speed. What is taking you weeks to hand-code today can be done confidently in hours. Check out https://bit.ly/PlumbTCR for early access.
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Introduction
(07:24) China's AI Ecosystem
(13:40) Public AI Engagement
(17:33) Sponsors : OCI / Omneky
(18:50) AI Tools Comparison
(35:37) Sponsors : Brave / Squad / Plumb
(39:14) AI Regulatory Maze
(51:02) AI Performance, Censorship
(55:28) Chinese AI Regulations
(01:04:37) Tech, Research Role
(01:12:11) Global AI Ecosystem
(01:23:22) Cultural AI Perspectives
(01:29:14) AI Safety, Cooperation
USEFUL RESOURCES:
Testing Chinese models: Yi-34B-Chat (made by Kai-Fu Lee's team 01.AI) can be tried out via Replicate (https://replicate.com/01-ai/yi-34b-chat) or Hugging Face. You can also use the ChatGLM playground (https://open.bigmodel.cn/trialcenter) and Baidu's ERNIE (https://yiyan.baidu.com/) without a Chinese SIM card.
Benchmarking models: SuperCLUE is one of the most prominent benchmarks - the latest results are on GitHub (https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/SuperCLUE) and the paper explaining the methodology is here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15020).
Regulation: Explainer (https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/07/10/china-s-ai-regulations-and-how-they-get-made-pub-90117) from Matt Sheehan; piece (https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-tight-ai-regs-hurt-chinese-firms) on how genAI regs are affecting Chinese companies.
US-China competition: Jeff Ding's work (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2173633) on the diffusion deficit in S&T; Bloomberg piece (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-china-huawei-semiconductor/) on Huawei's semiconductor development efforts.
Staying up to date: Sign up to alerts from CSET's Scout tool (https://scout.eto.tech/); subscribe to Concordia AI's AI safety (https://aisafetychina.substack.com/) in China newsletter (disclaimer: I used to work at Concordia!)
A 2016 profile (https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-37-happy-20th-anniversary) on Microsoft Research Asia by Wang Jingjing, covered in Jeff Ding's ChinAI newsletter
SPONSORS:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, instead of...does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off http://www.omneky.com/
The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR
Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to choosesquad.com and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.
Plumb is a no-code AI app builder designed for product teams who care about quality and speed. What is taking you weeks to hand-code today can be done confidently in hours. Check out https://bit.ly/PlumbTCR for early access.
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Introduction
(07:24) China's AI Ecosystem
(13:40) Public AI Engagement
(17:33) Sponsors : OCI / Omneky
(18:50) AI Tools Comparison
(35:37) Sponsors : Brave / Squad / Plumb
(39:14) AI Regulatory Maze
(51:02) AI Performance, Censorship
(55:28) Chinese AI Regulations
(01:04:37) Tech, Research Role
(01:12:11) Global AI Ecosystem
(01:23:22) Cultural AI Perspectives
(01:29:14) AI Safety, Cooperation
Released:
Apr 10, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
E10: The AI Voice Revolution with Mahmoud Felfel of Play.ht: The development of ultra-realistic human voices is upon us, and Mahmoud Felfel's company Play.ht is leading the next generation of text-to-voice models. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of automating a more human voice, as well as concerns about deep fakes and user safety. Also, you might be interested to check out the debut of Erik Torenberg's new podcast "Upstream". This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 is out now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1678893467 Timestamps: (0:00) Preview of Mahmoud on this episode (0:55) Sponsor: Omneky.com (1:45) Nathan clones his voice using Play.ht (6:11) Why Mahmoud started Play.ht and the problem they tried to solve (13:08) The job to be done for Play.ht & how they’re thinking about APIs and models (24:45) Mahmoud breaks by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis