ChinAI #221: NEC Silicon Valley as a Wellspring of China's AI Ecosystem (Part 2)

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Feature Translation: NEC Lab, the one who dragged Chinese companies into the AI era

Context: Last week, we covered the first half of a longform Leiphone article on NEC’s Silicon Valley lab’s connections to China’s current AI ecosystem. We learned about the story’s beginning — how the Silicon Valley outpost of a Japanese multinational attracted a group of Chinese AI researchers in the early 2000s — and its ending — Baidu convincing Yu Kai in 2012, who directed the NEC Lab, to lead its institute of deep learning. The second half of the translation, which we finished this week, fills out what happened in between.

Key Passages: In 2009, after achieving top research results, NEC experiences an exodus of talent, as key folks such as Yihong Gong (started a business) and Wei Xu (goes to Facebook) leave to commercialize their work. Yu Kai stays on as NEC director. In the years before the outbreak of deep learning, he helps create NEC’s final glory days, also making “unintentional” preparations for the AI boom in the Chinese industry after 2012.

• “On the first day of taking over the laboratory, Yu Kai proposed that everyone should stop speaking Chinese in the office and recruit talents more broadly. With this directive, everyone followed suit. The lab had recruited mostly Chinese people over the years, and the headquarters complained about the lack of diversity.”

• “Yu Kai also established extensive cooperation with academic and industry circles… In order to revive neural network research, Yu Kai and the later deep learning giants Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio organized a deep learning seminar at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), and invited Andrew Ng, then a professor at Stanford University, to give a report.”

• “In 2010, Yu Kai and Thomas Huang cooperated again…to win the first ImageNet challenge.”

NEC Silicon Valley’s successes did not just flow to China’s AI industry, they also fed back into the U.S.’s AI community and the global AI field. A few examples:

• “(After the ImageNet victory): The reputation of the laboratory was soaring, everyone's previous pessimism had been swept away, and NEC continued to attract outstanding young people to come in for internships. In 2011, Yu Kai received an email from Professor Trevor Darrell of Berkeley, saying that he had a particularly bright student who wanted to do deep learning…This student is Yangqing Jia…It was here (at NEC) that Jia started to get in touch with deep learning. Sure enough, a few years later, Yangqing Jia made Caffe, a deep learning framework that influenced the whole world. After that, he also participated in the development of frameworks such as Tensorflow and PyTorch at Google and Facebook.

• Other ethnic Chinese researchers trained at NEC made their careers in the U.S. AI industry: One former intern Huazhong Ning worked at Google, Facebook, and is now executive director of the perception team at WeRide, a Chinese autonomous driving startup that has filed for a U.S. listing. Two other interns, Jianchao Yang and Xiaoyu Wang, helped set up Snap’s AI Resaerch Institute.

We end by going back to the story of Yu Kai at Baidu. At Baidu, he brings in talent (including Andrew Ng) and recommends talent (in one story, he recommends one Baidu researcher to go to competitor Toutiao). In 2015, Yu Kai leaves Baidu to start Horizon Robotics — a bet on making chips for autonomous driving.

• One last example of young NEC-trained researchers who became well-known figures in China’s AI domain. Xi Zhou interns at NEC — connected via the bridge between Thomas Huang at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Yu Kai at NEC. “When the Chongqing Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was being established in 2011, the dean Jiahu Yuan went three times to the U.S. to invite Zhou to join, so he decided to return to China to make contributions and attract talents for the country. Four years later, he further implemented face recognition technology and founded Cloudwalk.” Cloudwalk is one of China’s top computer vision companies.

• The article concludes: “Nowadays, in China’s AI terrain, the Chinese people who came out of NEC Lab in Silicon Valley have laid down roots everywhere, growing with wild abandon.”

See the 9,000-word (22-page Google Doc) FULL TRANSLATION: The past happenings of NEC Lab in Silicon Valley: the one who dragged Chinese companies into the AI era

ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)

Should-read: GovAI Cross-Cultural Survey

Noemi Dreksler, Baoabo Zhang, and a GovAI team surveyed over 13,000 people across 11 countries on their views toward AI. One of the preliminary findings: US and European publics increasingly and overwhelmingly agree that AI requires careful management.

Should-read: How translator-influencers bring banned foreign videos onto China’s internet

For RestofWorld, Emily Liu collects a list of translator-creators (译制博主) who translate, subtitle, and edit short videos from foreign social media platforms, such as YouTube or TikTok. I really enjoyed the third entry in the list, which features video clips of street interviews and reality shows from Taiwan.

Should-read: My comments in China ChatGPT-related articles

I’m quoted in a few pieces about China’s ability to control ChatGPT-like models

• “Can Xi Jinping control AI without crushing it?” The Economist. “Jeffrey Ding of George Washington University points to the other side of the argument. Noting the ingenuity of China’s internet companies, he says, 'Sometimes limits to creativity spur more innovation.”

• “Why Chatbot AI is a Problem for China” The Atlantic. “I do think the Chinese government is concerned about the negative, harmful effects of AI,” Ding told me. Despite “the censorship,” he added, “we’ve seen from the past track record of Chinese companies and the Chinese government that there is a way forward with respect to creating breakthrough innovations in this space.”

Should-read: A Review of Chinese Scholarship on the Collapse of the Soviet Union

An article by Zuo Fengrong, an expert in Soviet history, that examines trends in Chinese scholarship on the USSR’s collapse, with lessons for China. From CSIS’s awesome Interpet:China project, which uses “newly translated primary source material to fuel discussion on strategic topics relating to U.S.-China relations and China's rise.” Jon Sine, policy analyst at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, had a great thread that analyzes this essay.

Thank you for reading and engaging.

These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.

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