Both the US and China are competing to dominate the AI race.

Nations fighting the trade war over basic goods like food export and defence items are in the past. Today, a technological wind has blown in their face leaving nothing except Artificial Intelligence (AI) in place to be given primary consideration.

The world is familiar with the battle between the US and China, but what we ought to know is that the main weapon they use to fight is strategic technologies. The US banning Huawei over security concerns is a part of it. It is not just the US and China that are in the ground. Other countries are also taking technology in their hand to blow on other countries. We can take India as an example. India banned numerous Chinese apps over privacy issues and security breach.

Henceforth, these improvements slowly impact the countries investment in AI sector. The US government has pledged to increase the spending on AI from US $ 1.2 billion this year to US $ 1.5 billion next year. US chief technology officer, Michael Kratsios has said in his speech that US President Donald Trump administration has taken ‘unprecedented action to prioritize American leadership in AI and Quantum.’ Winning the AI race by making countries a front-runner is potentially the most important challenge technologies face today. Not long after, China followed suit on August 28 by adding AI to the list of technologies that are restricted or banned from export.

AI chips and its importance

Both the United States and China are at a fierce competition to place themselves in the front to dominate the AI race. One of the most fought areas in the struggle is AI chipsets. Scientists predict that AI chips are a major effect of the ongoing trade war between the US and China that will accelerate the development. AI chips refer to a new generation of microprocessors which are specifically designed to process artificial intelligence tasks faster, using less power. They are created to accelerate AI software systems.

The customised chipsets are meant to increase the performance of artificial neural networks. Training and implementing of these systems require vast amounts of data and hardware that can process it in parallel while maintaining lower power demands. Recent research has gone into the invention of hardware exclusively designed for running software.

The US’s Nvidia and China’s Cambricon technologies

When AI chips are at the track combating to bring recognition, AI-accelerated hardware is considered no less. Another playground where countries gather is acquiring a patent to protect their innovation. Two companies from the US and China are already on the brawl. Nvidia, the US-based tech company is the market leader in graphic processing unit (GPU) hardware that has been used for increasing the speed of AI applications. The company designs GPU that acts as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars which can perceive and understand the world.

On the other side is Cambricon technologies that have become the poster child for the Chinese effort to lead in this area. The company pioneers the development of smart chips and processors with high performance and low power consumption for AI R&D. Cambricon is considered as a counterpart of Nvidia. Remarkably, from a patent innovation perspective, Cambricon is dominating the battle with more than four times as many inventions as Nvidia.

Patent innovation in the US and China

China was trying its level best to keep pace with the US innovations in terms of the patent. While software development is critical for the advancement of AI systems, specialized hardware is even more essential to ensure that the software can provide results in a timely and comprehensive fashion. The calculation on AI chip patent between the US and China for the past ten years show China passing the US and taking the spotlight in 2019.

To conceal the technologies for its own, China revised its list of banned or restricted innovations for export. The list had AI in it. China has made the development of AI systems a native imperative and China’s State Council published policy of blueprint in the summer of 2017 that set out the goal of creating the ‘world’s primary AI innovation centre’ by 2030.

The goal of the initiative was to make AI chips that could be used for mobile phones. Other perspectives were focused on software development. Two people who stood out and performed most were the Cambricon brothers.

Cambricon brothers, the face of AI Chip in China

The brains behind Cambricon technologies are brothers Yunhi and Tianshi Chen. The tech company found in 2016 has raised US $ 369 million in IPO at the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR market. The smart chip startup’s value stood at US $ 2.5 billion. Its flagship product Cambricon-1A is the company’s first-generation AI chip for edge devices and the world’s first deep learning processor for commercial use. The company also powers 100 million smartphones by Huawei and Alibaba through the derivative chips Cambricon-1H and Cambricon-1M. Cambricon’s new generation 7nm cloud-computing smart chip Siyuan 290 and edge-computing chip Siyuan 220 is expected to deliver large-scale revenue in 2021.

However, Chinese companies are criticised for only filing patents in their home country and this leads to some chaos about how valuable these patent filings are. Cambricon is notably exceptional to these criticisms as its substantial portfolio is made up of patent filed for in the US or using the World Intellectual Property Organisation international application. Even without Chinese patent filings, Cambricon will still have more US and international filing in this area. Nvidia has a large number of patents compared to Cambricon. But the drawback is that only a portion of it covers AI acceleration hardware.

As AI systems grow globally, Chinese organisations looked to expand the market; but the initiative was stopped by the Chinese government’s new export restrictions that ban AI from being shared. Chinese tech companies have a high potential of turning stockpile of patent into commercial success. But they face a lot of uphill in the western market and strive to get through it.