*That's worth a look.
Will Knight at Technology Review visits China
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Lee gives a talk entirely in Mandarin to an auditorium packed with about 300 Chinese students. He is dressed impeccably, in an expensive-looking suit and dress shirt, and he speaks in a confident, soothing tone. The talk touches on the interwoven trends that have driven the recent rise in machine intelligence: more powerful computers, ingenious new algorithms, and huge quantities of data. He argues that China is perfectly poised to take advantage of these advances.
“The U.S. and Canada have the best AI researchers in the world, but China has hundreds of people who are good, and way more data,” he tells the audience. “AI is an area where you need to evolve the algorithm and the data together; a large amount of data makes a large amount of difference.”
In 1998 Lee founded Microsoft’s Beijing research lab, which showcased the country’s exciting talent pool (see “An Age of Ambition,” June 2004). Then, in 2005, he became the founding president of Google China. Lee is now famous for mentoring young entrepreneurs, and he has more than 50 million followers on the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo....
