Who Is Winning the AI Race: China, the EU or the United States?

A new report from the Center for Data Innovation

Summary:

Many nations are racing to achieve a global innovation advantage in artificial intelligence (AI) because they understand that AI is a foundational technology that can boost competitiveness, increase productivity, protect national security, and help solve societal challenges. This report compares China, the European Union, and the United States in terms of their relative standing in the AI economy by examining six categories of metrics—talent, research, development, adoption, data, and hardware. It finds that despite China’s bold AI initiative, the United States still leads in absolute terms. China comes in second, and the European Union lags further behind. This order could change in coming years as China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the United States or the European Union. Nonetheless, when controlling for the size of the labor force in the three regions, the current U.S. lead becomes even larger, while China drops to third place, behind the European Union. This report also offers a range of policy recommendations to help each nation or region improve its AI capabilities.

Download the report.

Tag
Artificial Intelligence EU AI China US

Commenti

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Inviato da Luigi Nappi il Mer, 21/08/2019 - 13:36

Really interesting report! Thanks for sharing.

I tend to agree with the following sentence that “The future of AI is going to be a battle for data and for talent”. Given this “hard” fact, I would say that it is really relevant for EU now to define the right AI strategy and start its implementation as soon as possible to stay competitive with China and US and improve AI development.

Statistics from the report are really “stimulating” and impressive.

European Union has lots of AI talent (more than China), but US is attracting the most of AI talent and China is massively investing in AI to become the new leader in the field. In addition, even if “Private equity and venture capital funding for EU AI start-ups nearly tripled between 2016 and 2018” it is clear that “United States received more funding in any year between 2016 and 2018 than the European Union received in the three years combined; while Chinese AI start-ups received billions of more dollars in private equity and venture capital funding than the EU in both 2017 and 2018”.

So, now, more than ever, EU should also focus on strategy for key AI talent retention (e.g. with incentives plan, as suggested) as well as a policy to improve AI development, increase trust in AI and its related adoption.