Coding competition          Dec 7th 2017

Artificial intelligence looks tailor-made for incumbent tech giants. Is that a worry?

（开题抛出问题，AI 人工智能看起来像是给科技大公司量身订造的，这样会不会有问题？incumbent 这个词也是在经济学人里学的）

TWO letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A; deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”.

（两个字就值千金！AI无疑是2017年度投资最热的一项！

2017年9个月就投了76亿美金，而2016年整年才54亿美金）

At the heart of the frenzy are some familiar names: the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.A similar, though less transparent, battle is under way in China among firms like Alibaba and Baidu. Several have put AI at the centre of their strategies. All are enthusiastic acquirers of AI firms, often in order to snap up the people they employ. They see AI as a way to improve their existing services, from cloud computing to logistics, and to push into new areas, from autonomous cars to augmented reality.Many observers fear that, by cementing and extending the power of a handful of giants, AI will hurt competition. That will depend on three open questions,involving one magic ingredient.

( frenzy: great and often wild or uncontrolled activity

国外像google、亚马逊、Apple等公司都投入巨大资金研究人工智能，国内则是百度和阿里爸爸等，还被顺带被黑了一下， less transparent

人工智能辅助提高方方面面，云存储、物流、再到新领域无人驾驶等）

AlphaGone

（这部分的标题都mean了）

The tech giants certainly have big advantages in the battle to develop AI. They have tonnes of data,oodles ofcomputing power and boffins aplenty—especially in China, which expects to charge ahead. Imagine a future, some warn, in which you are transported everywhere in a Waymo autonomous car (owner: Alphabet, parent of Google), pay for everything with an Android phone (developer: Google), watch YouTube (owner: Google) to relax, and search the web using—you can guess. Markets with just a handful of firms can be fiercely competitive. A world in which the same few namesduke it outin several industries could still be a good one for consumers. But if people rely on one firm’s services like this,and if AI enables that firm to predict their needs and customise its offering ever more precisely, it will beburdensometo switch to a rival.

（ 大公司掌控的数据和资源很多，他们能在AI大战中轻松胜出，国内寡头更少

oodles of：informal-- a large amount of something

想象一下，出行用google的无人驾驶车，付款用google开发的安卓手机，看youtube 放松，然后搜索的话...能想到也是用google

duke out: informal-- to fight with your fists

市场有一些竞争者是好的，如果AI让那公司可以预测顾客需求和量身订造给他们服务，那将会很难很难再改变到另外一个竞争者的身上了）

That future is still a long way off.AI programs remain narrowly focused. Moreover, the ability of theincumbents to perpetuate their advantagesismade uncertain bythree questions.

The most important is whether AI will always depend on vast amounts of data. Machines today are usually trained on huge datasets, from which they can recognise useful patterns such as fraudulent financial transactions.If real-world data remain essential to AI, the tech superstars are in clover.They have vast amounts of the stuff,and are gaining more as they push into fresh areas such as health care.

（人工智能现在应用很局限，科技寡头们能不能“长生不死” 还是未知数

perpetuate：to cause something that should be stopped such as a mistaken idea or a bad situation to continue 我把它理解为长生不死，这个词的解释感觉是贬义词，用在这里真的是有的点刻薄了~ 这些写手们真的so mean

最重要的未知因素是人工智能在将来还是不是依赖大量数据，如果是的话，这些寡头们就可以继续地躺在安乐椅上哈哈笑了

clover: a small plant that has usuallly three leaves on each stem and that usually has round flowers that are white,red or puple 三叶草

in clover:过舒适奢侈的生活   再一次so mean~）

A competing vision of AI stresses simulations, in which machines teach themselves using synthetic data or in virtual environments. Early versions of a program developed to play Go, an Asian board game, by DeepMind, a unit of Alphabet, were trained using data from actual games; the latest was simply given the rules and started playing Go against itself. Within three days it had surpassed its predecessor,which had itself beaten the best player humanity couldmuster. If this approachis widely applicable, or if future AI systems can be trained usingsparseramounts of data,the tech giants’ edge is blunted.

（那个和世界冠军下围棋的机器人原来是靠从实战的数据中来取胜，后来就只给一些规则给它，它自己和自己对战，很快就赢了。 如果人工智能不用大数据来支持的话，那科技寡头的优势就会少一点了）

But some applications will always require data. How much of the world’s stock of it the tech giants will end up controlling is the second question. They have clout in the consumer realm, and they keep pushing into new areas, from Amazon’s interest in medicine to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, a professional-networking site. But data in the corporate realm are harder to get at, and their value is increasingly well understood. Autonomous cars will be a good test. Alphabet’s Waymo has done more real-world testing of self-driving cars than any other firm: over 4m miles(6.5m kilometres) on public roads. But establishedcarmakers, and startups like Tesla, can generate more data from their existing fleets; other firms, like Mobileye, a driverless-tech firm owned by Intel, are also in the race.

（第二个问题就是这些寡头手里最后到底能控制多少占比的数据？

这一段不太好理解，是说有些领域不单单要收集人的数据，还要收集实际路上的数据？）

The third questionis how openly knowledge will be shared. The tech giants’ ability to recruit AIexpertise from universities is helped by their willingness to publish research;Google and Facebook have opened software libraries to outside developers. But their incentives to share valuable data and algorithms are weak. Much will depend on whether regulations prise open their grip. Europe’s impending data-protection rules, for example, require firms to get explicit consent for how they use dataand to make it easier for customers to transfer their information to other providers.China may try to help its firms by having negligible regulation.

（第三个问题就是这些数据和知识的共享开放程度有多大。google 和facebook都有开放软件图书馆给外界的程序员，但是有价值的数据和算法则是“不给看的”）

The battle in AI is fiercest among the tech giants. It is too early to know how good that will be for competition, but not to anticipate the magic ingredient that will determinethe outcome:the importance, accessibility and openness of data.

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Results

Lexile®Measure: 1000L - 1100L

Mean Sentence Length: 14.64

Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.20

Word Count: 776

这篇文章的蓝思值是在1100-1100L， 适合英语专业大二大三的水平学习，应该是经济学人里属于最简单的一列。

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