The Chinese government wants to make sure that the country becomes the number one in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030, Edith Yeung, head of 500 Startups' China unit, told CNBC Tuesday.
"If you look at the internet worldwide, in the U.S. — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. And in China there is the BAT — Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent," she said at East Tech West in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China.
"China is so interesting because there is so much data," she added.
"I think there are a lot of Chinese citizens proud of the fact that 'hey we're actually big enough to even be able to compete with the U.S. in terms of AI. And I think it is just a really exciting time to be in China," she said.
Yeung also talked about the Chinese internet report 2018 and the impact government policy in the country has on the internet landscape.
"Everything in China is really not that scary. It's actually really exciting to help decipher what is going on," she said. "But what we can't ignore is that the Chinese government is very particular in content."
"If in sensitive cases, the government may ask you to take a certain application down. For cases like this, it is less of a worrying for investors honestly because we don't actively operate any of these apps," Yeung said.
"But certainly we want to make sure entrepreneurs and founders are aware of this regulatory policy to make sure they don't get into trouble"
One example in the report is the impact government policy has had on fintech (financial technology) after cryptocurrency exchanges were banned in 2017. China's central bank and regulatory commission tightened rules around internet financing and peer-to-peer online lending in December 2017.
This wiped out smaller players, and the last three years have seen the number of P2P companies shrink from 6,000 to 2,000, according to the study.
No comments:
Post a Comment