China’s facial-recognition startups can probably pick you out of a crowd
Chinese facial-recognition companies are getting very, very good at what they do.
Locking 'em up: A police department in China went from capturing a handful of suspects a year with officers watching CCTV cameras to capturing 69 suspects in one month after deploying software made by the firm SenseTime.
Big data: Companies in China have access to a government trove of video surveillance footage that’s unmatched on the planet. Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, told the Financial Times that his firm has processed 500 million faces and has a single client that needed 300 million faces verified.
But: China is leading the way in facial-recognition software and trying to become an AI powerhouse. But foreign governments won’t like the idea of their citizens’ data living on Chinese servers. Besides, American companies are hard at work on their own surveillance technology.
Deep Dive
Artificial intelligence
Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build
“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.”
Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google
Hinton will be speaking at EmTech Digital on Wednesday.
The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized
ChatGPT has sparked speculation about artificial general intelligence. But the next real phase of AI will be in specific domains and contexts.
Video: Geoffrey Hinton talks about the “existential threat” of AI
Watch Hinton speak with Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI, at EmTech Digital.
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