A lot of people still are questioning the motion. But it's fair and simple: Google needs to tap local Chinese AI talents. Their size is grow so large that it can't be ignore. And you don't have to read it between the lines, it's front and center on the Google's official blog post[1], stated by Google Chief Scientist for AI/ML Feifei Li:
China is home to many of the world's top experts in artificial intelligence (AI)
and machine learning. All three winning teams of the ImageNet Challenge
in the past three years have been largely composed of Chinese researchers.
Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015
and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that
their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled.
