Economist, Sept 29, 2018 (I)

choi

Artificial intelligence | The Gladiator's Edge; In its competition with America to dominate artificial intelligence, reckons a well-placed insider, China will prevail.
(book review on Kai_Fu Lee, AI Superpower; China, Silicon Valley and the new World Order. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

Quote:

the first 1 1/2 paragraphs: "CHINA'S 'Sputnik moment' came on May 27th 2017. On that day an algorithm thrashed Ke Jie, the world's best player of Go, an ancient and demanding Chinese board game. Mr Ke's defeat by AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by DeepMind, a British firm that had been bought by Google, was as much a blow to China's psyche as the Soviet satellite was to America's self-esteem in 1957. Within months, China announced ambitious plans to dominate AI by 2030.  Kai-Fu Lee thinks it will succeed. He is well placed to judge. He moved from Taiwan to america at 11, earned a PhD in AI in the 1980s * * * Now he runs a Chinese venture-capital fund, which gives him a ringside seat  for the contest between what he calls the two 'AI superpower,' China and America.  He thinks China will win because it has the edge in the four determinants of AI success; brains capital, regulation and data.

"In his view, Chinese entrepreneurs are 'gladiators,' who have assimilated 'the lessons learned in the coliseum,' namely 'killed or be killed.' He recounts dirty tricks and anticompetitive ruses. * * * By contrast, American firms are complacent.

last paragraph: "Despite its futuristic theme, Mr Lee's book fits into a familiar genre of business scare stories. In the 1960s the French were aflutter about 'Le Défi Américain [The American challenge]' by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber; In th 1980s Americans were paralysed by Ezra Vogel's 'Japan as No One.' 'AI Superpower' should be taken seriously. But it is not the final word.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) French-English dictionary:
* défi (noun masculine; from [verb] défier. [to defy, challenge]): "challenge"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/défi
* In French, Amérique (noun feminine), américain (adjective masculine) and américain (noun masculine; feminine singular américaine) means, respectively America, American (adjective) and American (noun; referring to a person). Note the lowercase for French adjective and noun: américain.