Alistair Way

Chinese firms have powerful AI capabilities. How could the progress of the technology in China differ from the West? Mr Alistair Way, Head of Equities at Aviva Investors explains.

China has struggled to catch up with Western firms when it comes to high-level semiconductor development – and with the recent round of legislative measures in the US, which contain tough sanctions against Chinese firms, it probably never will. Instead, it is devoting more and more energy into areas of technology where it can already credibly be described as the world leader. That means software and AI.

There is a huge amount of data in China, and there were historically far fewer restrictions on the ability of tech companies to use, exploit and own data without protections for consumers than in the West. Although Beijing has introduced laws to improve and modernise the data-protection regime since 2017, companies are still likely to have to share consumer data with the government if ordered to do so. This would give a Chinese government-sponsored AI programme a broader dataset with which to train machine-learning models than is available in the West.

Chinese AI development could go in good or bad directions. For instance, Baidu can claim to be a world leader in safe autonomous-driving technology – that looks a positive trend. Equally, Beijing is making progress in facial recognition and other tech-enhanced ways to monitor, control and exploit parts of society. That is clearly a negative outcome and will be accelerated by new developments in AI.

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