Book summary AI super-powers, China, silicon valley and the new world order by Kai Fu Lee

We are in the stage of implementation/application as opposed to RnD
- having access to more data is more important than have expertise to do more RnD
- having solid AI engineers is more important than AI researchers
We are still far from general AI
Key ingredients
- data
- computing
- maybe work of strong AI algorithms engineers

Silicon Valley businesses are mission and core values driven while Chinese businesses are pragmatically focused on profitability.
Silicon Valley businesses stay in bits and binaries offloading the brick and mortar to external vendors vendors while Chinese businesses extend their business model into the brick and mortar (online to offline)
Silicon valley prefers one size fit all strategy, Chinese businesses utilized localized solutions often investing/acquiring in local startups
Americans treat search engines like Yellow Pages (come and leave fast) while Chinese treat search engines like shopping mall (come to linger around long)
Silicon Valley is adversed to copying preferring to be unique Chinese business copy the heck out of each other

Abundant data – quality and quantity aided by their online to offline initiatives
hungry entrepreneurs
AI scientist
AI friendly policy environment – strong emphasis by Chinese government
Hardware manufacturing know how – Shen Zhen
- unparalleled supply chain flexibility – XiaoMi

Darwinian eco-system has lead to extreme levels of competition
Chinese companies have already moved past the stage of clone Silicon Valley business models
Businesses innovate to build a defensive moat around themselves. Local businesses have advantage, with no timezone differences to deal with, decision making is relatively faster.
Online to offline
- an essential ingredient to building strategic moats
- caused the decline of cash use
Chinese government information systems will be able to leap frog US government information systems

Google – impeccable safety
Tesla / China – trial by fire
key to winning the Autonomous AI race
- is the bottleneck technology (Silicon Valley) or policy (China)?

having cheap labor is no longer going to be a source of advantage in a world heavily powered by automaton. Developing countries hoping to employ this well tested strategy to progress will not be able to do so anymore
Estimated 60% potential job loss worldwide barring policy interventions
Job loss probability assessment
- physical labor
  - environment – unstructured versus structure
  - tasks nature – level of dexterity versus high dexterity
- cognitive labor
  - social – high versus low
  - cognitive – optimization based versus creativity/strategy based
AI replacement approach
- single tasks approach
- ground up rethink re-imagination
A population of irrelevant (no longer employable) as opposed to unemployed

Humans freed up from repetitive tasks can now focus on becoming more human oriented