China dominant in AI by 2025?

Via Bruce Schneier's site, Gregory C. Allen has an interesting report: "Understanding China's AI Strategy: Clues to Chinese Strategic Thinking on Artificial Intelligence and National Security".

He states that "the distance is large between prevailing views in American commentary on China’s AI efforts and what I have come to believe are the facts," although having read the text I have to say that nothing in it particularly surprised me, interesting though it all was.

I found this quote striking:

"In future battlegrounds, there will be no people fighting.” Zeng predicted that by 2025 lethal autonomous weapons would be commonplace and said that his company believes ever-increasing military use of AI is “inevitable […] We are sure about the direction and that this is the future."

My first thought was that this seems more plausible in theatres where there were no civilians, since trying to minimise civilian casualties surely requires AGI and don't hold your breath. But then I remembered Hiroshima and the recent 'liberations' of Mosul and Aleppo and realised that of course it doesn't matter. There are no new issues here at all.

In the comments to Schneier's post, some people with backgrounds in AI proposed that China's claims to global pre-eminence in AI by 2025 are spurious because there have been no conceptual advances in AI at all in recent years. It's all 1970s-style Bayesian statistics and neural nets running on processors now numerous and fast enough to make it all work non-trivially.

There is something in that of course, but I strongly suspect that the road to conceptual breakthroughs to more human-like AI architectures is one which first has to run through those existing ideas and drive them to their limits. If the next step was easy, or even apparent, we'd have a plausible roadmap already. By getting to the front of the engineering state-of-the-art, China can expect to be well placed to initiate and exploit the next set of conceptual advances - indeed, there is no other way.