Podcasts about sinovation

In 2017, leading AI expert Kai-Fu Lee shared a dire prediction: half of all jobs – both blue collar and white collar – could be automated within ten years, replacing the workforce with solutions built on artificial intelligence. Brad and Kai-Fu discuss what this coming change means for national economies and for people who care about their work. Kai-Fu lays out practical steps policy makers can take today to prepare, the three areas he believes human intelligence will continue to lead, and why he remains an AI optimist.Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has driven innovation in AI research and development for over three decades. He is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and President of Sinovation Venture's Artificial Intelligence Institute. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China, and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. In the field of AI, Dr. Lee built one of the first game playing programs to defeat a world champion, as well as the world's first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. His bestselling book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order discusses US-China co-leadership in the age of AI, as well as the greater societal impacts wrought by the AI technology revolution. His new co-authored book AI 2041 explores how AI will change our world over the next 20 years.Click here for the episode transcript.

This week, the BBVA Mind Bank podcast features a special one-off interview between two people who firmly believe artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world for the better. It features BBVA Chairman, Carlos Torres Vila, in conversation with world renowned artificial intelligence expert, and founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Dr Kai-Fu Lee. BBVA and Sinovation share a deep interest in artificial intelligence, with a particular interest in how the technology can be used to positively impact the way people live and work. Over the course of 35 or so minutes, the pair debate where the technology is now, the differences between how AI is being developed in China versus the West, the importance data will play in AI reaching its full potential, and where the future may lie for machine learning technologies. They also touch on topics include the value of data, how businesses are using that data and where and how privacy of data should be managed.

In episode 47 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma dive into a topic they have been wanting to cover for a while now: Chinese educational technology (edtech). Specifically, they focus on VIPKid, a company that has an incredible number of competitors but is by far the largest in terms of scale for its cross-border model of English-language instruction. Notably, 8 of the 12 startup unicorns categorized as edtech by CBInsights are from China — and this does not include the number of publicly listed Chinese education companies in the U.S. Our co-hosts explain that edtech (alongside the recent TechBuzz topics of online brokerages, e-cigarettes, plastic surgery, and e-sports livestreaming) is yet another example of an industry that is thriving in China but is either not widely reported on or would not work well in other markets.Rui and Ying-Ying begin by exploring the landscape for English learning in China, in the context of edtech. They remind our listeners that while over 300,000 students from China study in the U.S. every year, this demographic is a drop in the bucket as compared with the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens who are alive today. The reality is that the country as a whole ranks low in terms of education attainment: The average Chinese person has only had 7.5 years of formal schooling. Of today's Chinese millennials, almost 20 percent have college degrees, already a sharp increase from the less than 5 percent of Chinese people who are college educated and now in their fifties and sixties. These and other trends, combined with a highly regulated education sector in China, mean that the “TTE” — test prep, tutoring, and extracurricular activities — market for K12 in China is an enormous $18 billion opportunity.Listen to find out: Just how much are Chinese parents spending on extracurricular tutoring for their kids — and how does that compare with the spending of parents here in the U.S.? How much of that funding is going toward English-language tutoring, and what are the reasons behind the Chinese obsession with learning English? How does this all provide context for the legend of 36-year-old VIPKid founder Cindy Mi, a high school dropout who then made her way to an elite M.B.A. program? How did the company first gain traction, and what are its curriculum and business models like today? How did VIPKid come to raise over $800 million from the likes of Sequoia, Tencent, Sinovation, and Coatue, and how did it come to generate at least half a billion dollars of annual revenue with over 600,000 paying customers? What are some of Rui and Ying-Ying's predictions about the macro factors that may impact VIPKid's business in the coming years?As always, you can find these stories and more at pandaily.com. If you enjoy our content, please do let us know by leaving us an iTunes review, liking our Facebook page, and tweeting at us at @techbuzzchina! Thank you also to our listeners over at our partner, dealstreetasia.com.We are grateful for our awesome producers, Shaw Wan and Kaiser Kuo, and our interns, Wang Menglu and Mindy Xu. Thank you!Our co-hosts plan to take the week of July 4th off and to return in mid-July. Happy Independence Day to our U.S. listeners!

In episode 47 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma dive into a topic they have been wanting to cover for a while now: Chinese educational technology (edtech). Specifically, they focus on VIPKid, a company that has an incredible number of competitors but is by far the largest in terms of scale for its cross-border model of English-language instruction. Notably, 8 of the 12 startup unicorns categorized as edtech by CBInsights are from China — and this does not include the number of publicly listed Chinese education companies in the U.S. Our co-hosts explain that edtech (alongside the recent TechBuzz topics of online brokerages, e-cigarettes, plastic surgery, and e-sports livestreaming) is yet another example of an industry that is thriving in China but is either not widely reported on or would not work well in other markets. Rui and Ying-Ying begin by exploring the landscape for English learning in China, in the context of edtech. They remind our listeners that while over 300,000 students from China study in the U.S. every year, this demographic is a drop in the bucket as compared with the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens who are alive today. The reality is that the country as a whole ranks low in terms of education attainment: The average Chinese person has only had 7.5 years of formal schooling. Of today’s Chinese millennials, almost 20 percent have college degrees, already a sharp increase from the less than 5 percent of Chinese people who are college educated and now in their fifties and sixties. These and other trends, combined with a highly regulated education sector in China, mean that the “TTE” — test prep, tutoring, and extracurricular activities — market for K12 in China is an enormous $18 billion opportunity. Listen to find out: Just how much are Chinese parents spending on extracurricular tutoring for their kids — and how does that compare with the spending of parents here in the U.S.? How much of that funding is going toward English-language tutoring, and what are the reasons behind the Chinese obsession with learning English? How does this all provide context for the legend of 36-year-old VIPKid founder Cindy Mi, a high school dropout who then made her way to an elite M.B.A. program? How did the company first gain traction, and what are its curriculum and business models like today? How did VIPKid come to raise over $800 million from the likes of Sequoia, Tencent, Sinovation, and Coatue, and how did it come to generate at least half a billion dollars of annual revenue with over 600,000 paying customers? What are some of Rui and Ying-Ying’s predictions about the macro factors that may impact VIPKid’s business in the coming years? As always, you can find these stories and more at pandaily.com. If you enjoy our content, please do let us know by leaving us an iTunes review, liking our Facebook page, and tweeting at us at @techbuzzchina! Thank you also to our listeners over at our partner, dealstreetasia.com. We are grateful for our awesome producers, Shaw Wan and Kaiser Kuo, and our interns, Wang Menglu and Mindy Xu. Thank you! Our co-hosts plan to take the week of July 4th off and to return in mid-July. Happy Independence Day to our U.S. listeners!

In this episode of China Money Podcast, listen to all the news headlines in the China venture and tech sector for the week of June 3 to June 7, with Eudora Wang sitting in for Nina Xiang in Hong Kong. Topics covered include Sinovation Ventures closed the third RMB-denominated fund at RMB2.5 billion (US$361.72 million), China issued the first batch of 5G licenses for commercial use, and ByteDance, the Chinese operator of short videos app TikTok, invested RMB1.26 billion (US$182.27 million) in a pre-initial public offering (IPO) round of financing in Chinese sports commentary app Hupu. Be sure to subscribe to China Money Podcast for free in the iTunes store, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

The media tends to hyperbolize and boosterize technologists and the work that they do, creating all kinds of absurdly over-the-top titles for them. But when CBS’s 60 Minutes dubbed Kai-Fu Lee “the oracle of A.I.” earlier this year, it was actually a spot-on assessment. Lee has indeed been at the forefront of the field for more than three decades and is without question an artificial intelligence visionary. There are few people in the world who understand A.I. so astutely, especially within so many social and cultural contexts. His accolades speak volumes: In 2013, Lee was named to that year’s Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, and this January, he was named co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s A.I. Council. His new book, A.I. Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, quickly rose to become a New York Times bestseller. Lee’s got one extraordinary résumé: After receiving a B.S.in computer science from Columbia University in 1983, he went on to get his Ph.D. in 1988 from Carnegie Mellon, where developed Sphinx, the first-ever speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. In 1990, he joined Apple as a research scientist, heading up multiple R&D groups there for several years. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at Microsoft, where he established what would become Microsoft Research Asia, and later, upon returning to the U.S., he was named a vice president at the company. In 2005, he decamped to Google, resulting in a widely publicized five-month legal battle with Microsoft. Once settled, Lee helped bring Google to China, overseeing its growth and operations there for four years. Lee now runs Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in start-ups in China, many of them in the A.I. space. As of a year ago, according to Bloomberg, Sinovation had $2 billion under asset management with more than 300 companies in its portfolio. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Lee shares with Andrew Zuckerman his fascinating story of emigrating from China to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age 11; why he remains rationally optimistic about A.I. (and its increasingly potent presence in our lives); and how a recent bout with cancer drastically altered his outlook on life and work.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and President of Sinovation Venture's Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, manages $2 billion in investment funds, is a leading venture capital firm focusing on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China and held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Times 100 in 2013, WIRED 25 Icons , Asian Business Leader 2018 by Asia House, and followed by over 50 million audience on social media. In the field of artificial intelligence, Dr. Lee built one of the first game playing programs to defeat a world champion (1988, Othello), as well as the world's first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. Dr. Lee founded Microsoft Research China, which was named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review. Later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, this institute trained the great majority of AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei, and Haier. While with Apple, Dr. Lee led AI projects in speech and natural language, which have been featured on Good Morning America on ABC Television and the front page of Wall Street Journal. He has authored 10 U.S. patents, and more than 100 journal and conference papers. Altogether, Dr. Lee has been in artificial intelligence research, development, and investment for more than 30 years. His New York Time and Wall Street Journal bestselling book AI Superpowers discusses US-China co-leadership in the age of AI as well as the greater societal impacts brought upon by the AI technology revolution.   Connect Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaifulee/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/kaifulee Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/kaifu_lee/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/drkaifulee/ Google+ – https://plus.google.com/101657038397569061811 Website – http://www.sinovationventures.com   People Mentioned Confucius Elon Musk – https://twitter.com/elonmusk   Resources VIP Kid – https://www.vipkidteachers.com/    Books AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee: https://amzn.to/2QmNV6y

The influence of artificial intelligence on our world is only growing, as smart home products, algorithm-based streaming platforms, and even autonomous vehicles become a part of our daily lives. Since the 1990s, American tech companies in Silicon Valley have dominated the development and application of AI-driven technologies. However, AI pioneer Dr. Kai-Fu Lee explains that China has rapidly caught up with the United States, accelerating AI innovation and implementation in our daily lives. Lee argues that the future of AI will be even larger than the industrial revolution, posing unprecedented challenges and responsibilities for both AI superpowers. Are the United States and China going to cooperate or compete? Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of Sinovation Venture’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, is a leading technology investment firm focusing on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the president of Google China. Previously, he held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University both in computer science, as well as honorary doctorate degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In the field of artificial intelligence, Dr. Lee founded Microsoft Research China, which was named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review in 2004. Later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, this institute trained the great majority of AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei, and Haier. While with Apple, Dr. Lee led AI projects in speech and natural language, which have been featured on Good Morning America and in the Wall Street Journal. He has received 10 U.S. patents, published more than 100 journal and conference papers, and written seven top selling books in Chinese. He has over 50 million followers on social media.    

In the 1990s, as the dotcom era began to unfold, artificial intelligence (AI) expert and developer Kai-Fu Lee was busy at Apple streamlining many of the company’s early R&D projects. Those initial days, or the era of development, as Dr. Lee has since come describe it, were dominated by American technological innovation. Corporations like Apple and Microsoft paved the way for Silicon Valley companies to become global leaders. However, as Dr. Lee details in a new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, we have moved to the era of AI implementation, and Silicon Valley is no longer the center of gravity it once was. While American tech giants remain formidable players, the most prominent companies in areas of speech synthesis, computer vision, and machine translation are all Chinese. Moreover, Chinese consumers are significantly more comfortable than their American counterparts in embracing the growing role of AI in their daily lives. For instance, unlike in the United States, the overwhelming majority of Chinese transactions now occur on platforms such as Weibo, allowing companies to gather data at an unprecedented rate. With the increasing industrial application of AI, the potential for huge numbers of American and Chinese jobs to be replaced by technology has enormous economic and political implications. On October 2, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee shared his views on the future of AI in both countries, as well as possible risks with the National Committee.   Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of Sinovation Venture’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, is a leading technology investment firm focusing on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the president of Google China. Previously, he held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University both in computer science, as well as honorary doctorate degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Kai-Fu Lee 李开复 is one of the most prominent figures in Chinese technology. He founded China’s noted early-stage venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures after launching and heading up Google’s China operations during their years of growth from 2005 to 2009. Born in Taiwan and educated at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon, Kai-Fu had an early career in Silicon Valley, including a stint as principal research scientist at Apple. Microsoft brought him to Beijing in 1998 to set up a research division, as he has seen the rise of the Chinese internet from its earliest days.   Kai-Fu has more than 50 million fans on the social media platform Weibo and is a much-loved public speaker and author. He is perhaps most admired for his gutsy investing in Chinese startup companies: Sinovation puts money into startup companies in their riskiest early years or even months. Kai-Fu founded it in 2009, at least half a decade before the world began to take Chinese innovation seriously. He was an early believer in mobile companies when many investors were still seeing the internet as a desktop world. Now Kai-Fu is turning his attention to artificial intelligence (AI), and he spoke to Kaiser and Jeremy about it for this podcast at — of all places — the Trump International Tower in midtown New York City. Jiayang Fan from the New Yorker was finishing off an interview as they arrived, and she stayed for the chat. The discussion ranges from new technologies that are coming from Chinese engineers to the inexorable rise of AI and how it will change the way we live, work, and think. Recommendations: Jeremy: “My Family’s Slave,” a controversial cover story in the June 2017 issue of the Atlantic about a Filipina-American “nanny” who raised the author. Jiayang: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary on the only bank in America prosecuted for mortgage fraud, which brings the characters of the Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown in New York to life. Screenings started on May 19. Kai-Fu: An “anti-recommendation” against all sci-fi movies except one: Robot & Frank. The 2012 film, he says, gives a truly realistic and thought-provoking view into what the next steps for AI technology may be. Kaiser: “Friends Like These: How a famed Chinese dissident got caught up in America’s culture wars,” the 2013 Reuters profile of the political kerfuffle in the U.S. over blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng.