{"id":45508,"date":"2021-07-05T11:59:32","date_gmt":"2021-07-05T08:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=45508"},"modified":"2025-09-01T11:31:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T08:31:57","slug":"chinese-developers-outpace-the-united-states-in-an-international-smart-city-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/chinese-developers-outpace-the-united-states-in-an-international-smart-city-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese developers outpace the United States in an international smart-city competition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology giants Alibaba and Baidu won the AI City Challenge, beating competitors from 38 countries. Chinese firms or universities took first and second places in all five categories, writes Wired<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, took second place in the competition for detecting car accidents or stalled vehicles on highways.<\/p>\n

According to American official John Garofalo, who participated in the contest, the number of US teams this year was much smaller. Organisers said they do not track participants by country.<\/p>\n

Stan Caldwell, executive director of Mobility21 (which develops the smart-city platform in Pittsburgh), noted that China invests in research and development relative to GDP at about twice the level of the United States. In his words, this is a key factor in preserving competitiveness.<\/p>\n

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“We are committed to developing technologies to improve safety, efficiency and resilience. But we selfishly want the technology to develop here and to improve our economy,” Caldwell said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Representatives from Alibaba and Baidu declined to comment. The successes in solving smart-city problems may contribute to the development of commercial offerings by both companies, say experts.<\/p>\n

Alibaba’s City Brain tracks more than 1000 traffic lights in Hangzhou, a city of 10 million people. The pilot program showed the platform reduced crowding of people and helped free lanes for emergency services.<\/p>\n

Nvidia founded AI City Challenge in 2017 to spur AI development for real-world scenarios, notably counting vehicles crossing intersections or detecting accidents on highways. In the early years prize-winning teams were from the United States, but already in 2020 Chinese companies won three of the four contests.<\/p>\n

Earlier this June, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence unveiled the WuDao 2.0 language model<\/a>, which is ten times larger than OpenAI’s GPT-3.<\/p>\n

In March, China unveiled a five-year plan to accelerate the development of advanced technologies<\/a>, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing.<\/p>\n

Previously, the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence published a report with recommendations for business and government on preserving the country’s technological dominance, including vis-\u00e0-vis China. In the document the PRC was named the main challenge to U.S. technological supremacy<\/a>, which threatens economic and military power for the first time since the end of World War II.<\/p>\n

In 2020, China also surged to the lead in the number of AI-related scientific publications<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to ForkLog news on Telegram: ForkLog AI<\/a> \u2014 all the latest AI news!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech giants Alibaba and Baidu won the AI City Challenge, beating competitors from 38 countries. Chinese firms or universities took first and second places in all five categories, Wired reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[438,133,1695,26],"class_list":["post-45508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-china","tag-smart-city","tag-usa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"17","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45510,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45508\/revisions\/45510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}