Artificial intelligence has had more than its fair share of ups and downs over the past 60 years, but one constant feature of the field has been the dominance of the US. Significant contributions to AI have certainly arisen elsewhere but, until recently, every AI system that made worldwide news originated in the US.
DeepBlue, which defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, was an IBM system, as was Watson, which defeated champion Jeopardy players in 2011. The robot Stanley, which demonstrated the feasibility of driverless cars in 2005, was developed at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. And if you dig a little deeper, the reasons for the dominance of the US become clear: Darpa, the US military research funding agency, is acknowledged in many of the key research papers in the AI canon.
But today American hegemony in AI is being seriously challenged for the first time. One of the most remarkable features of the current AI boom is the sudden and very visible presence of China as a global force.