Chinese tech heavyweights and startups alike are scrambling to answer the country's call for greater investment in core artificial intelligence technology, after the government rolled out a national plan seeking to lead the world in AI research and application. "We will beef up resources to help China gain a lead in AI research," Liu added. The national plan aims to grow the country's core AI industries to over 150 billion yuan ($22.15 billion) by 2020, 400 billion yuan by 2025, and 1 trillion yuan by 2030. Baidu Inc, the search engine leader in China, said in March it had poured more than 20 billion yuan into AI R&D in the past two and half years. Xu Li, co-founder and CEO of SenseTime, a Beijing-based image recognition startup, said he is very excited about the national AI development plan.

Source: The China Post July 24, 2017 23:37 UTC