Unintelligent design

13 December 2017 By Christopher Beddor

By opening an artificial-intelligence research center in China, the Alphabet unit is acknowledging the Xi government’s bid for leadership. Yet unlike most IP battles, knowledge in this nascent field is fluid and hard to capture. Beijing’s AI largesse is bound to leak to the U.S.

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Google will launch its first center in China focused on basic artificial intelligence research, the company said on Dec. 13. The center will consist of a small team operating out of the Alphabet unit’s Beijing office.

Google moved its search-engine traffic to Hong Kong in 2010 rather than comply with Chinese requests to filter its results. Since then, access to its app store, email and cloud storage services has been largely blocked in China. The company’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, spoke at a state-run internet conference earlier this month, where he discussed the potential of artificial intelligence and the ways Google supports Chinese companies.

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