Chinese Artificial Intelligence Research on Track to Converge with the US by 2020

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A new report indicates that China’s research endeavours in the field of artificial intelligence are fast approaching those of the United States, and set to match them in terms of quality and influence by the end of the decade.

While China has produced a greater volume of AI research papers than the US for several years, uncertainty has remained over the quality and clout of their efforts.

In order to address this issue the Allen Institute for AI looked at over 2 million AI research publications to the end of 2018 via the Semantic Scholar academic search engine.

Its analysis of Semantic Scholar data found that China has published more AI papers than the US since 2005, and is not far behind it in terms of research papers most commonly cited by other scholars.

Should current trends persist China will be on par with the US in terms of AI research by 2020, with a 10% of top research papers.

China’s 2019 government work report made reference to artificial intelligence for the third consecutive year, as well as debuted the term “Smart +” (智能+) as new area of economic growth.