Algorithms trained on mountains of Chinese data may soon be making decisions that deeply affect the lives of people in the US.
Take Yitu Technology, a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence start-up that won top honours in two AI competitions in the US last year for its facial recognition technology. The system was built for Chinese law enforcement using data collected by the authorities. Or as the company boasts, it was honed on the “world’s largest portrait system, covering more than 1.5bn people.”
Yitu is now looking for customers in the US to put its software to work. “There are a lot of applications for this technology,” says Wu Shuang, who heads its Silicon Valley research group.