AI: China vs The West

China is taking the lead in the world of AI — slowly but surely…

Anyone who has followed the ascent of Chinese businesses in recent years is aware that they have outpaced their Western competitors in terms of the fervour with which they have thrown themselves into initiatives using artificial intelligence. Although it’s true that companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are also seen as necessary players in the “AI game,” it doesn’t seem unreasonable to anticipate that they will be dethroned in the upcoming years. A glance at the actions of the three major Chinese digital firms, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, provides evidence for this.

We cannot overlook the reality that these firms are in charge of the second-largest economy in the world, despite the fact that they have not yet made big moves toward Western markets, making their brands even less well-known at home. The most well-known use of Baidu is as the Chinese version of Google. With a market valuation of close to $100 billion and a market share of 65 percent of Chinese searches, it is ranked number 23 on Forbes’ Top 100 list of digital firms. Similar to Google, Baidu offers shopping, news, and navigation services. Only Amazon can overtake Alibaba, the sixth-largest Internet corporation in the world, in the worldwide competition for sellers’ marketplaces. The two main applications of Chinese social media behemoth Tencent, WeChat and QQ, are now only available in China. WeChat has social media platforms that are comparable to Facebook, but it also has a far larger variety of applications that include chatting, posting on message boards, sending images and documents, and more. In fact you can use it to pay for your goods at a fruit stand around the mountain’s summit (my own experience)! In other words, the system is completely ubiquitous all around China, which makes the market size and the impact its having far larger. Additionally, it works well for reloading transportation cards, reserving hotel rooms, purchasing rail tickets and pay for parking. Tencent applications serve as the main news source, a method of connecting with friends, a venue for forming business partnerships, a space for enjoyment, and many other digital chances for more than one billion Chinese users worldwide.