Perhaps this is because I don't have the hard facts and figures right in front of me, but I have a hard time believing that foreign tech investments in China really pay off. The Chinese strategy seems to be to woo big foreign companies, build a critical mass of local users who want the product, ban or otherwise limit the foreign company's influence in China, then develop a home-grown Chinese version of the foreign company's product with state support and the newly acquired domestic talent.
If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company? Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?
An AI center is not a product like a search engine or Windows, or an e-commerce site.
It helps China cultivate talents, why would China limit its influence.
MSRA accomplishes many things worthwhile such as ResNet in China, and it prospers now. Some researchers enter MSRA, and some leave. They enter or leave not because the government force them to do so, they enter or leave because they can tell where opportunity resides.
I'm not asking why China would limit it, I'm asking what Google gains from it.
If Google's top talent in China will mostly be poached within the next 10 years, is it really worthwhile to open a research center there? MSRA is a very good example, but at the end of the day, it's still a training ground for Chinese researchers. Paradoxically, the more important it is that Chinese researchers work on at Google China, the more likely that Google is to lose those researchers to government or private competitors.
I made a video that actually analyzes the data behind this. Basically the entry-level of the field is about 50% Chinese and the more experienced levels are about 10-20% Chinese. On the other hand only perhaps 5% of work actually comes from Chinese labs.
Not necessarily easier, just cheaper. Google can throw as much money at ML as it wants, but I contend that a top ML researcher is probably worth at least 3-5x more than mediocre one.
Yeah, I've worked with quite a few top ML researchers at US universities and many of them are Chinese nationals. Even here in the US. With China's economy booming the way it is and the overall political climate in the US right now, many see a better quality of life for themselves and their families in China. It's not just about cost.
What are they making? I've not heard of any >$200k/year ML researchers returning to China: usually it's good, but not amazing, researchers that do return.
check the board of directors and the top management team in Google, can you see any Chinese name in the list? now check the same lists for BATJ, Alipay and Huawei.
with such bamboo ceiling in place, google doesn't stand a chance to complete for the best of the best.
On one hand, I have to agree that China's closed/censored society is directly at odds with the product offering of a company like Google ... on the other hand, does one simply disengage from such a massive market as China? Perhaps Google is betting on a future when there is greater freedom for the Chinese people.
I personally think Google's best approach would be to pay hand-over-fist for the best Chinese AI/ML experts to emigrate to the US and do their work here. However, Google seems to be taking the shotgun approach of employing more experts in the short-term while guaranteeing them less job stability in the long-term.
I think you're right in that it really does depend on when China becomes a free society. Personally, from what/who I know from China, I don't see this happening within the next decade. I expect political instability within China to reach a tipping point, after which we'll either see a very slow global liberalization or a definitive move towards a more totalitarian Chinese government with a modern twist.
Honestly I don't know why Google has any faith in the good will of the future Chinese government. As has been established for a very long time, China needs foreign expertise more than any foreign company needs a labor or consumer market within China.
I think Google just wants to recruit AI talents from China and uses research from the AI center in China in markets it is not banned.
If so, they don't need to interact with the government that much like when they offered a search service to Chinese netizens.
I can think some companies that just do this. Hulu has an office in Beijing, although it doesn't offer video streaming service in China. And Grab has an office in Beijing too, although it only targets Southeast Asia market.
The basic strategy is to woo Western companies with extremely cheap labor and vague promises about access to the Chinese market, in order to get the companies to export most/all of their capital equipment and business expertise overseas. Then this is used as leverage to force them to adopt PRC-friendly policies (see Apple and government censorship in China, for example) and IP transfer to Chinese firms. Keep in mind that in China there is no objective judicial system as in the West to mediate disputes between the government and firms; once your assets are there you are at the mercy of the PRC.
It's really important to understand that this is a long-term geopolitical strategy by the PRC to supplant the US as the dominant global superpower, and a big part of it is siphoning off the industrial and manufacturing capacity of the west (see One Belt One Road Initiative).
Fair, but in my opinion a researcher who first publishes X result is usually the best equipped to first publish (or not publish, simply discover/use) Y result which depends on X. If we freely gave all US military research to Zimbabwe they wouldn't develop a top-tier military program because they don't have the expertise to understand and implement the knowledge that we have. This isn't the case with China
Isn't something published available to all the world?
If Google first publishes some result X, and Chinese researchers find this result, they are free to use this result to publish some result Y, regardless of whether Google opens an AI center in China.
This will sound condescending, but it's not meant to be,
The short answer is no. The field of research is completely fucked up. You are incentivized to explain your research in as much detail as is required to get a top publication (which honestly isn't much, just look at NIPS this year, there are a ton of overly vague, "exploratory" pubs that really describe jack-shit) but absolutely no further, as this could allow a competitor to fully continue your research and get the next major pub from it. So you want to describe enough so that people understand your research at a high level, but so that nobody can truly understand at a technical level what you've done.
So in essence no, research isn't something that is as freely communicable as publications. It really does require personal expertise, in the sense that there is a ton of knowledge contained in experts that you can't find anywhere in publications.
> but I have a hard time believing that foreign tech investments in China really pay off.
If it didn't pay off, apple wouldn't be the most valuable company in the world.
> The Chinese strategy seems to be to woo big foreign companies, build a critical mass of local users who want the product, ban or otherwise limit the foreign company's influence in China
What else do you expect them to do? Cede their entire market to foreigners? Every country did the same thing. The europeans did it. We did it in the US. The japanese and the south koreans. It's really common sense.
> If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company?
If they did, why would google invest in china? It's been 40 years. If investing in china wasn't lucrative, it would have ended a long time ago.
> Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?
The real question is why is it that we get the exact same type of comments in every thread about china?
Go through every china related thread on HN and every single one has the exact same comments. Why?
If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company? Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?