I think he might be referring to companies like SenseTime which were in fields like image/video recognition. I think for fields like this there is a cultural barrier which prevents companies like these from being successful in US.
Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands.
I was seeing a Vice video on the surveillance technologies the companies are building in China where the engineer building it was so excited to show the technology he had built not thinking about how invasively it tracks everything, keeps history etc. I would just call it a cultural gap.
You also have face recognition used in law enforcement in Britain too, though. And from top of my head, Britain was the first country to mass roll out CCTV system as well.
But that hasn't been replicated in most Western nations. This went to court and you had a lot of scrutiny on this.
In PRC, because of cultural differences I think most people accept the crime safety net you get over personal freedom restrictions and you can't really meaningfully challenge any such move even if you wanted to. Anyway, it is the same in Singapore and people seem happy with it despite being exposed to all the Western culture too, so I think it is a cultural thing.
The thing that British were the first to roll out this but we haven't seen any advanced analysis stuff out in public after it kind of shows the apprehensiveness around it.
It's true that the lack of awareness of privacy is pretty prevalent even in industry. Hence the ease of obtaining large amount of highly curated data. But it is also true that these details are used as material for sensationalist journalism. Sometimes I can tell clearly (by understanding what they speak) the interviewees were so innocently excited without knowing how they are cut into videos. But I could be biased too.
Yeah, I don't doubt it. It could very well have been edited to look like that, either for views or sensationalism. Here is the video if you want to see: https://youtu.be/CLo3e1Pak-Y
ByteDance and iFlytek have stood out to me. I saw iFlytek's universal translator at the airport one time and it was really impressive. There's also a number of examples in Kai-Fu Lee's book "AI Superpowers" - I guess that's the book that put this thought in my head in the first place
