Blacklisted facial recognition and surveillance companies

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Welcome to another fully connected episode of Practical AI where my co host Chris and I keep you fully connected with everything that's happening in the AI community. We'll take some time to discuss some of the latest AI news and dig into some learning resources to help you level up your machine learning game. I'm joined today as usual by my co host Chris Benson, who is a principal AI strategist at Lockheed Martin. How you doing Chris? Welcome back from vacation.

Thank you very much.

It's good to be back. Yeah, you. So our listeners may not know but you you got to have a nice, nice couple weeks of vacation and hope you had some good some good rest with that.

I I did. I I had started as as we were recording some previous episodes in the uk but my wife is British so she and my daughter joined me there and we spent two weeks with family and friends and had a great time. Thanks thanks. It was good. It was nice just to to walk away for two weeks and and recharge the batteries. So I'm back, ready to go.

Awesome. Well, you may or may not know, but during the last couple weeks while you were enjoying vacation, the international AI politics world kind of exploded a bit to to say the least. So there's, there's been some developments related to China and, and AI and that's definitely been kind of a central point in the news that's intersected the AI community. So I thought that might be good to, to dig into a bit today. What do you think?

Absolutely, let's jump into it. And I've been largely sequestered from the news, so I'll be coming in bright eyed and bushy tailed hearing it for the first time. So let's dive in with what you got, Daniel.

Sounds good. And yeah, and I should say I don't think either one of us consider ourselves complete, you know, or even semi experts on international trade and politics and all sorts of things that factor into this. But kind of the, the bottom line is that AI and tech and these sort of interactions that have been happening between the US and China, they're all kind of intertwined in this really weird and interesting and sometimes disturbing way. And so yeah, maybe a good way to start out this discussion would just be to, and it give a little bit of background on some of the elements that are coming to coming into this. So we're eventually going to get to a point where we can talk about this AI blacklist that the US came out with that kind of is blacklisting US companies from doing business with certain AI companies in China, which is why we're talking about it on this podcast. But there's a whole bunch of things factoring into that. One of those is the, the Uyghur population in China. So the, the Uyghurs in China are an ethnic minority. They're, they're a Muslim minority group in China in the, in the western part of China, in Xinjiang. And it's pretty well documented at this point. So we're not speculating here, but it's pretty well documented by the United nations and others that there's been about a million of these ethnic Uyghurs in China that have been detained by China in, in re education camps, what they call re education camps, essentially. Detained. Have you heard about this?

Totally. Have. I, I, that was, you know, before I went on vacation that had been going on for quite some time. And, and I think it's, I think it's tragic as, as anytime that you have a government clamping down on ethnic groups. You know, that's just, just, it's a sad situation. So yeah, I think it's definitely something that we should all be aware of if we're not already.

Yeah, definitely. I mean there's of course, a lot of human rights issues tied up in this. But it is interesting that the, that all of this sort of stuff that's happening with the Uyghurs in China is very connected actually to AI and the tech side of things. So of course, China has been taking kind of a harder line approach to dealing with these Muslim minorities. And part of that has to do with like this sophisticated surveillance technology that they're, that they're developing and deploying across this region. I think you've probably mentioned a couple times on the podcast, you know, things related to facial recognition, if I remember right, and some of the, some of the ethics things tied into that.

Yeah, I mean, China in terms of surveillance of its own citizens, China, I mean, doesn't just lead the way globally. They are in a classification all by themselves. I recently, for, for a talk that I was giving that wasn't specifically about this, but I was looking at different cities around the world with surveillance and you know, that had different, some tie into AI and some didn't and such. But, you know, China just dominated the list. If you looked at the raw number of cameras in the regions, China just, you know, orders of magnitude more. So there's kind of China and then there's the rest of the world in terms of, of surveillance of this type.

And yeah, it's increased too. I think in the, I think it was around like spring and June, I started seeing a pretty big surge in academic research papers that, I mean, you could imagine cases where maybe they wouldn't be used for surveilling Muslim minorities. But it was almost like completely obvious that these papers from Chinese researchers were, were geared towards upping the surveillance of these, of these minority groups. I'm just pulling up a couple of those now that I, that I had had written down. So this one, it's an article, it's like facial feature discovery for ethnicity recognition. So it's not like really like hidden, you know, at all there. They even talk about constructing a data set, an ethnical group face data set, including Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan and Korean. And, and so these, these papers are not so subtle. And it's pretty clear that there's a lot of AI research that's, that's actually going into this, which is, which is, is pretty disturbing. I know there were a lot of people at that time kind of calling for peer review journals to, to up their, you know, ethics part of their review with these things. And I guess that gets into some conversations around censorship and other things. There's a whole lot of things factored in here.

But, yeah, it's kind of, you know, we've talked previously about, you know, the, the social credit system that is in place in certain parts of China and has been, you know, going through implementation over the last couple of years and continues to be implemented starting in, you know, major cities such as Beijing and then moving out from there. And this is, you know, what we're seeing with the Uyghurs here is essentially kind of the worst case scenario being realized, you know, where you're specifically targeting an ethnic group and you're using this, this advanced technology to enable that targeting. It's, it's the world that we, we definitely didn't want to see coming about, you know, as lovers of these, of these technologies that we talk about every week.

Yep. And on top of that. So this is kind of a first slice of the complication pie. A second slice of that, of course, is the ongoing US China trade negotiation, slash trade war stuff that's happening. I'm sure even while you were on vacation, you probably could not avoid hearing every once in a while someone talking about that at the pub or something like that.

Oh, constantly. So it was, I mean, in the UK while I was there, I mean, everyone talks about, obviously, Brexit, but they also talk about the Americans and the Chinese and Trump and all of that. So, yeah, even though my wife largely tried to ban me from social media news, you know, anything that was online to try to get me to focus on the family, which I tried to comply with as best as I possibly could, I think I succeeded. I still, you know, we would, we would meet up with friends and family and they would immediately say, chris, what's the American take on this and that and the other? And I would try to explain. So, yeah, I mean, the US China trade war is, is one of those top things that everyone around the world is talking about right now.

Yep. And it's kind of in a state of going back and forth like, oh, we're going to put tariffs on soybeans and whatever, and then we're going to put tariffs on cranberries and we're going to put tariffs on X, Y and Z. And so you got this back and forth. I think even today, at least at the time of this recording, there's trade negotiations going on between Trump and his team and the Chinese delegation in Washington.

Correct.

But yeah, so that's kind of pie slice complication too. Then you've got all of this other stuff that's happening in places like Hong Kong, especially Hong Kong, where there's been these pro democracy protests going on forever. Of course, facial recognition and surveillance has been, you know, a topic in that as well. I've seen pictures of, you know, protesters taking down these surveillance, like polls or like posts that have cameras on them and stuff. So there's, there's a lot of, so there's a pro democracy protest element going on there, tied in with, with China, but also an AI component as well.

There is. I remember even yesterday I was reading an article that Apple in the, in the iPhone app store had removed an app that told protesters where police were and the, the, the, the Hong Kong government. Their position was, you're putting police lives in danger. I, I sense though that the reality is quite the opposite in terms of, of who is actually in danger. So.

Yeah, yeah, and there's, I mean, there's really a lot of elements of this. There's even the NBA, the, the basketball, which I'm not a sports person, but the NBA is huge in China. I do know that. So they're, they're involved in this now because of some of the things that a, a coach or manager had said. You know, the TV show South park, they're, they're kind of embroiled in this. So there's like all of these different elements where like the US and China and AI and tech and trade are all sort of coalescing into this weirdness, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, we're, it's, it's definitely, you're definitely seeing, you know, we're seeing divided world in so many, so many areas. And this is becoming a rather extreme case of it.

Yep. So that brings us to whenever it was last week, I guess, at this point where we have this blacklist of AI companies come coming out. So the US Commerce Department said that it's adding a bunch of Chinese organizations and businesses to this list, but it includes at least eight primarily AI focused companies adding to this list, called the Entity List, for acting against American Foreign Policy Interests. It's a long name, but essentially what this does, like the mechanism or what it results in, is that it bars US Companies from selling technologies to these blacklisted entities, which obviously is a type of sort of sanctioned situation.

Sure, absolutely. And I think the concern there is is probably, you know, first and foremost, security issues on whether or not information is collected and passed back to China for use by the government or even, even by commercial entities that are maybe operating on behalf of the government. And then obviously there's intellectual property issues tied to it as well. This episode Is brought to you by Brave. The Brave team is on a mission to fix the web by building an open source, privacy focused and performance oriented browser. Browse the web up to eight times faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default and reward your favorite creators with the built in basic attention token. Yes, you heard that right. A real world use case for blockchain. Download Brave for free using the link in the show notes and give tipping a try on changelog.com.

Okay, so there's these eight AI focused companies that have been blacklisted by the US government. And I kind of started, as I was thinking through this, I started thinking, first of all, I mean, there's probably interesting technology in a variety of ways that these companies are developing. Whether it's being used for bad or good, I'm. I'm not totally sure. I mean, they are kind of all tied up in this, this complicated situation. And so I thought maybe, Chris, if you're up for it, maybe what we could do is just try to do a sort of blind taste testing of these companies and see essentially who they are, what they say they're developing, what news sources are telling us that they're developing and kind of, I guess get a pulse on, you know, a kind of state of the Chinese AI companies and what they're doing and what is interesting tech wise, maybe what is cool and, and positive, what isn't cool and positive, what, what everybody's saying. I don't know. Are you up for that game?

I'm up for the game. So, so essentially here in front of all of our friends listening, we're gonna go to their websites and take a look at what they, what they're saying.

Yeah, definitely. So I'll, I'll kind of start us out. I thought maybe. So I'll go to a first one's website and kind of try to tell you what my impression is of what they're, what they're developing, what they have.

Okay.

And then, and then maybe at the same time you could look up a couple of news articles that you find and we can see if, if they have the same impression of what they're doing or if there's a gap there or whatever, whatever we can learn. Sound good?

It's a deal. What company you want to start with?

All right, so the first one on my list that I had seen was called Hick Vision or Hick Vision, I'm not sure the pronunciation. This demonstrates that I'm really going into this blind. Sorry, I'm mispronouncing Your, your company name, I do apologize. But they. So their website that I'm at is us that, that he or hikvision.com and it looks like, like the big thing that I'm noticing when I go to this website is everything about cameras. So there's pages of like network cameras, like product selectors where you can select your camera. It's talking about apertures on cameras and advanced sensors and all sorts of things. But I see a kind of tab that's, that's machine vision. And so that seems probably to be what, what's most relevant for us. So it says hikvision success and video surveillance market was established, blah, blah, blah. They have fast and accurate positioning guidance, dimension measurement and identification. And this is from the robotics division. They're kind of highlighting here an under vehicle surveillance system and machine vision cameras. So it looks like they're kind of promoting this, the usage of this technology in a variety of ways which do seem completely legitimate. Right? Like if you're trying to see if there's bombs under your car, you could have this camera system under your car. I'm assuming that's what it's meaning to, to identify certain objects under a car. And they're also, they're also emphasizing the machine vision side of things in terms of like manufacturing. So installing these cameras in manufacturing places to trace certain objects through your, your factory, let's say, or to sort items in your, in your factory. And so that's kind of the sense that I get that they're, they're, they're really leading in machine vision, but emphasizing a lot of these industrial applications of the, of the machine vision. I do see one example that's an unmanned aerial vehicle, so a drone. And they're emphasizing use of that in managing transportation infrastructure and equipment. So like highways.

Gotcha. So while you were doing that, I googled and got a Bloomberg article called China's and I'm probably going to butcher the name too, but He Vision has probably filmed you is what the article title is. Starts with a couple of bullets. It says cameras are installed at army bases, airports and schools. And then second bullet says Trump administration concerned about Chinese spying tactics. And as I scanned down through this article while you were talking, there was one paragraph that kind of jumped out. It says He Vision, which is controlled by the Chinese government and dahu, are leaders in the market for surveillance technology with cameras that can produce sharp full color images in fog and near total darkness. They also use artificial intelligence.

I mean, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, they are. They also use Artificial intelligence to power 3D people, counting cameras and facial recognition systems on a vast scale. And so I certainly can understand why the US Government, if any of that is accurate and if they were using it in certain venues, I could understand why there might be a concern over that. That doesn't mean obviously that I have any insight into their activities or how they use it, but I could certainly understand why any government might be concerned about the potential for another government to have to be able to use these technologies to gain insight from an intelligence standpoint.

Yeah, I mean, the sense it is interesting because the sense I get from the website is very much like a manufacturing focus even, you know, some of the headlines are about industrial area scanning cameras and of course the traffic transportation management stuff. And so, yeah, at least on the English version of the site, that's kind of what they're emphasizing, which I mean, to be honest, that seems like a very legitimate use of the technology and, and probably something that Amazon and others are, are doing as well. Right?

Yeah. And there's, it's interesting that you raised that. You know, a few months ago there was a bit of a scandal with Amazon, specifically aws, you know, in its services being used by, you know, for facial recognition, being used by law enforcement here in the US with, with our citizens. And it was a bit of an uproar. And Amazon turned around, I believe, by the way, was, was the recognition with a K product and they stopped selling it to law enforcement, is my understanding. If I recall correctly, it's been a few months.

Right. But maybe they're using it in their warehouse for similar things that are being emphasized on this website. Right, like traceability or smart logistics is how they kind of term it.

Totally. It's funny, as we talk about this, I spend a lot of time on the topic of AI ethics as part of, of my job and other tangential interests to that. And you know, you know, as I look at this, you know, it's really all about what are your, what is your attention here? If you're looking at this company, if they're using it for some of the use cases that you outlined, then you know that that is beneficial. That is something that, you know, that increases the capability potentially if they're using it for nefarious purpose purposes, you know, it really comes down to intent and use case, you know, in terms of, you know, whether or not they're being fairly called out or not.

Yeah. And I think that, I mean, probably if they're advertising these things and they have like use case stories around Them, I imagine they are using the technology for manufacturing and logistics and those sorts of things. I guess the, the shadiness is probably the connection with the government.

Right.

And you know what, they potentially don't feature on the website.

And I think that's a fair statement. The concern, I think that. And it's different, it's not universal, it's different between the US and the uk I've noticed the US concern is largely on kind of worrying about the nefarious issues and intent. The UK on the other hand has, has, you know, largely said they are absolutely going to continue to do business with China. And you know, they have, you know, outside China, you know, you know, London in general. London is one of the most surveilled cities in the world with their CCTV system and, and they are a lot less worried about it there. It's, it's an interesting perspective shift for sure.

So let's go to candidate number two company on the blacklist, number two that we're, we're going to look into. And this one's called Ifly Tech. Pretty sure that's the correct pronunciation. I don't know how else you would, you would say that. So that one's easier.

Okay.

Ifly Tech, do you want to take a look at their website and maybe we can, maybe we can flip flop and then I'll kind of see what I can find elsewhere on the, on the Internet.

Okay, that is fine. So I have found their website. This is all in Chinese for the moment. All in.

Ah, you got to get some Google Translate going. Yeah, open that in Chrome.

I did open it in Chrome but it didn't automatically translate. So maybe we'll flip flop for the moment so we don't waste people's time. And then I'll take, I'll do the article Googling.

Here we go. And I would like to take this time as a proud data scientist with SIL International to highlight the world's language problems that are still yet to be solved. Yeah, so I did get the Translate option there. So I got the Translate option and it's telling me. Let's see, I'm scrolling down. There's a bit about education on the, on the front and I see this sort of odd looking robot thing like Robot Guy. They're talking about Internet plus government affairs. Solve the roundup operation between civil affairs departments. They're talking about an AI lab all around application of government and industry, intelligent business, smart tube business. I'm assuming maybe that has to do with trains or something like that. But they have this, I don't know, they have this thing called Hyper brain or Hyper Brain project, which is a laboratory for speech and language information processing. That sounds pretty cool. Cognitive intelligence system based on a humanoid neural network based on the key prod projects of the 800 people. So I, this is all a translation, but it seems like they're at least doing something with like machine intelligence language. Looks like they've got some partnerships with like malls and shopping and some developer toolkit sort of stuff. So that's pretty much what I'm. I may be butchering all of that because I'm working off of a translation, but right at the top it says empower the world with AI. So gotcha. Seems pretty ambitious.

It does. I found an article here. It's technology review.com why 500 million people in China are talking to this AI. Um, and it was funny when I pulled in, just as you were starting to get into looking over their webpage, when I heard Ifly tech, I. I just assumed it was a drone company. Yeah. Not being familiar with it, you know, iFlytech, I just came from the first Alpha pilot race, you know, going back to a recent episode where we talked about Alpha pilot. So I was thinking that. So I was rather surprised to suddenly realize it was language based. They talk in this article about a bunch of things including that they have a developer platform called the iFlytech Open Platform, which provides voice based AI technologies to over 400,000 developers in various industries.

Yeah, I see that developer tab on the website.

Yeah, they're, they're valued in US dollars. They'd be valued as a $12 billion company. International operations, you know, Looks interesting. Looks a lot like.

Yeah, I mean this. Honestly, a lot of the things that they mentioned are personally interesting to me in terms of the voice and language technology for sure.

Which reminds me, and I'll say this out loud so that all of our listeners here, we've got at some point to interview you about that because for those listeners who don't know, Daniel is quite the expert in that area. So upcoming episode I've now committed you to in front of our entire audience.

All right, we can, we can definitely arrange, arrange that sometime. Yeah, I. Did you, did you see anything in those articles about this whole, like one of the things I see them keep emphasizing here is like education and like these child toy robot things.

Yeah, there is a, there's a picture at the top. Let me, let me delve into that here. I think that's what we're getting into. What do you know about that while.

I, I don't know it just says children's intelligence and then I'm trying to open up the page but it's not letting me go there. Hopefully I'm not, I'm not blacklisted.

No, it's, it's talking about a lot of different uses but I haven't seen the, the, the children one yet.

Interesting. Yeah, I see machine translation, smart office, intelligent transfer which I'm not sure what that is. Audio, Children's intelligence and, and learning or education.

They, they have a voice assistant for drivers and I, I will not. I'm not going to try the Chi, the Mandarin word for this but the English translation is little flying fish.

Nice.

I like it. Very quaint there. Cool.

Well I mean, I mean it seems like they're involved in a lot of cool stuff. I don't know if they're, if there. It seemed like one of the first things that came up with the last one, the hikvision was the very close connection with the government.

Yes, it was. So just as speaking as someone who doesn't know these companies I could see the possibility for ominous overtones on that. On the first company we looked at this one seems a lot friendlier, a lot more child and consumer oriented. It doesn't, it certainly doesn't come off as, as with those ominous overtones. So.

All right, well let's see, let's see if we continue that trend into company number three which is MEGV or Megvi. Maybe one of those. It's MEG V I, I. Okay so why don't you take the website this, this time around so long.

As he has the English because I don't have the translate button. So we'll try it out here, see.

If, see if you got.

There we go. I do, I have an English version. Power humanity with AI. Okay.

Ambitious there.

Power humanity. I know let's not, let's not dream small. They have a proprietary deep learning framework. They gather top tier AI talent and they integrate. So far this first page is very typical of what you see with companies.

Touting sounds like, I mean Google Brain OpenAI sort of feel.

Yeah it does. They describe themselves just as a world class AI company with core competency in deep learning as full stack solutions. It kind of feels IBM ish, you know kind of like a bunch of corporate talk, you know that.

Somewhat vague.

Yeah, somewhat vague. I'm so sorry to you IBMers. I really wasn't trying to insult you. I'm just apologize.

IBM is doing a lot of cool stuff. Hopefully we'll have someone from there on soon we're talking to.

Okay. Leadership team of young. They're all men. They're all young men. They all could be. They look the age of my own grown children. So now I'm feeling really old. Okay. Yeah.

Well I'm looking. So I'm looking at a couple articles from Wired and TechCrunch. It looks like one of the big news recently was that the company had an IPO public listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange. But both of these articles that I'm looking at definitely have the more ominous overtone. Probably similar to the first one. It's a very, very big focus in both articles which we'll link in the show notes for sure. All of these things we're talking about but much more focused on facial recognition behind the rise of China's facial recognition giants. So this, this is saying that MEGV is, is one of the four Chinese AI startups specializing in facilities facial recognition. So they specifically call that out as their specialty and valued at more than 1 billion which is pretty crazy. So that would qualify them this saying, qualifying them as a, as a unicorn in Silicon Valley speak. So a unicorn obviously promoting a lot of deep learning technology, but seems like that 1 billion and their IPO and most of their value is related to facial recognition and surveillance.

Yep.

It says megv's investors include Alibaba, Ant Financial and the bank of China which I think if, I mean I'm no expert on those companies, but I think that's a fairly close tie to the Chinese government.

Yep, probably so. Interestingly, I don't think the website comes off quite as ominously as I've been scrolling around. Through. Really does have that very corporate y feel to it. You know we're. And a little bit, you know, where rather than talking about the applications, they talk about their amazing deep learning capabilities and they talk about, you know, smart cities and a lot of the normal buzzwords that you find with American Silicon Valley companies. So cool.

It sounds, I mean they're coming off definitely more research focused. They are it seems like the, maybe the other two kind of to be competitive with like a Google brain or, or OpenAI or something like that.

Yep, I would agree.

Cool. Well let's you know say that megv definitely has some, some interesting, interesting things going on but maybe there's a sort of ominous overtone that's coming through. Are you getting that?

Possibly so yeah. Especially from what you read from what you mentioned.

All right, so that brings us to our last contestant today. I don't know if I should be phrasing this as a game because it's quite serious stuff.

It is.

I don't know what else to do.

Let's have fun with it.

All right, sounds good. I'll take the website this time around. This one is yi2 yitu not again not sure on the pronunciation. Y I T U Hopefully some of our, our listeners maybe correct us on some of these things that I'm sure we're getting wrong but here. Okay, so I'm at YouTube. I actually like their website quite a bit. Um, it's much more appealing design wise to me than the, the previous ones I was looking at. So great job there yi2 but it looks like they're also so seems like a very similarly Google brainy researchy type website. They say that they're developing technologies that are driving change in the world and those include proprietary full stack technology in depth explorations into fundamental AI technologies including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language comprehension and human machine interactions. They talk about being champions in the face recognition vendor test which is apparently a gold standard for global industrial applications. They talk about management technologies, 100 million scale data traffic unlocking multi industry scenarios for intelligent cities and having world class technology talent. So there's definitely a sort of we're, we're exploring all the AI things feel plus that sort of very clear call out that they are the best in the world at facial recognition. There's, there's no hiding that yeah these are the, these are the best.

And I, I see that I saw two articles. One they, it talks about that they are seeking an IPO. That's from Bloomberg. It was a recent one on September 3rd just over a month ago as we record this and then. But the, the other one is a CNBC article and the title is these Chinese facial recognition. This Chinese facial recognition startup can identify a person in seconds. And it starts off with keypoint World champions man apparently so it starts off with the points that China plans to be a global leader in AI by 203030 which is we've all known for a while and the market for facial recognition alone is expected to be 9.6 billion by 2022. The next bullet is a little bit scary but we, it's something we already know. It's China's facial recognition database includes nearly every one of China's 1.4 billion citizens. And then it just talked about the fact that they had wide recognition for their facial scan platform. And so a little bit of an ominous overtone before you even get into the article right There now this is CNBC and it, you know, and potentially it's a, an American take as such on that. But yeah, definitely feels like, you know, a little bit closer to supporting government aims, social currency such as that.

Yeah. One interesting thing that I'm noticing here on this one is, I mean similar to some of the other ones, they're emphasizing some of the non facial recognition stuff that they're doing, which sounds amazing. I mean there's like a cancer detection tool improving diagnosis of sick children, pushing the boundaries on Mandarin speech recognition. Really cool stuff. And one interesting thing is that some of this, like the sick children one, they talk about Chinese us, this joint development and so there's definitely a international flair to, to some of this research which they're, which they're highlighting, which yeah, a lot of that sounds, sounds really cool and I, I don't doubt that, you know, it's not like we can't, I can look at the link to these papers, right. They're publishing papers on, on the cancer stuff and, and other things. So it's definitely not like they're, they're just falsifying what they're doing. Right. But facial recognition and that surveillance is a piece of it.

Yeah. And that once again comes back to what is their intent, what are they trying to do with it across their use case spectrum and probably many are very reasonable use cases, but there are some. This article certainly leaves that amos overtone in terms of how it might be supporting the social currency system in China, which obviously there's a value difference right there between Western values and Eastern values. At least there in China that's the kind of thing that would scare most Westerners in a variety of Western countries. I think even in places like in the UK and London where people expect to be surveilled, I think they would expect that the way the information is being used is not so nefarious. So it's interesting to see as we look at global trade, how we're going to reconcile some of these differences in terms of how we approach society, how we approach business and trade. And I think some of these companies, they may be acting completely appropriately based on an objective standard. I think one of the scary things certainly for the American perspective is just the ability to verify that, the ability to understand that they're dealing with a vendor that does not have an ulterior motive and stuff. Whether or not that would deserve to put them on the list here or not, I have no insight into that. But it's a tough thing and I don't think we're anywhere near solving that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, if I was to summarize kind of what I think I've seen in going through this exercise, which again is just a brief exercise, so, you know, I'm sure there's many more elements of this that we don't know about. But if I was to kind of summarize my. Where my mind is at on it is, you know, on the positive side, these AI companies and researchers in China are without a doubt top notch.

Absolutely.

And are doing some amazing things in computer vision, but also outside of computer vision, in places like language and other areas like chat and dialogue and voice. And so there's no question that they are producing some amazing research findings and advancing those fields. But there's kind of always this undertone of like, well, how, how much are these companies involved with the Chinese government and how much of their funding is coming from these projects that are explicitly targeting and marginalizing these, you know, Muslim minority and other communities. So there's kind of always like, yes, we know you're innovating in all these areas, but there's kind of this shadow cast on a lot of that, which is unfortunate in terms of, you know, how much of it is being used for, for those purposes. So that's kind of where, where my mind is at, I guess.

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a real cultural difference in terms of, of knowing, you know, you know, as someone who is working in, in the American defense industry, it is you, you generally know whether or not a company in this industry has a direct government die or not. You may not know the specifics of the work that they do, but we don't tend to, to leave that so ambiguous in terms of your understanding. You know, I work for Lockheed Martin. Everybody knows that Lockheed Martin does work with the, with the US Government and other governments. It's not hidden, it's in the news all the time. And so you kind of know what you're getting there. I think the challenge in certainly American minds and maybe Western minds at large, is the fact that the relationships are not so obvious with China and the companies between the government and the companies that are there. And in my very biased viewpoint, I would argue that if they were able to establish more clearly in a transparent way what their business with their own government is, if any, that would help alleviate many of the concerns that other countries have, because obviously no nation state is going to want to subject itself to potential spying by any other country. And that's not even specific to these cases. But I think this is one of those things where having that relation, whether you have a relationship or don't have a relationship between government and, and business, being transparent about the existence or lack of one would certainly alleviate concerns around the world.

Sure. Well put. And I think that this whole episode, it's been a learning experience for me. Hopefully it has for our listeners as well. We will put all of the links that we accessed into our show notes so that you could do, you know, recreate our experiment if you like, before we close out for the day. I just wanted to mention on a completely different subject, TensorFlow 2.0 that happened and you know, we always like to share a few practical learning resources. Hopefully again, this episode has been a learning resource in, in some ways, but I'm on the practical programming side. Francois Chalet created this really nice TensorFlow 2.0 and Keras overview Colab notebook. So we'll link that in the notes if you're, if you're wanting to keep up with that TensorFlow 2.0 stuff. And Keras, that's a great place to start. So I definitely want to take a look at that.

Absolutely. And I want to invite all of our listeners to engage us. So many of you already do. Engage us in our Slack community, engage us on Twitter, on LinkedIn. Today was an experiment as an episode and we enjoyed ourselves. Let us know whether you liked it. If you didn't like it, let us know that too. We're going to continue to experiment with the show and try different things. And a lot of the things that we try come from your comments. So don't hesitate to let us know what you think and make suggestions. And thank you for listening again.

All right, we'll talk to you soon, Chris.

Take care, Daniel.

All right, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Practical AI. If you enjoyed this show, do us a favor. Go on itunes, give us a rating, go in your podcast app and favorite it. If you are on Twitter or social network, share a link with a friend. Whatever you gotta do. Share the show with a friend if you enjoyed it. And bandwidth for changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more@fastly.com and we catch our errors before our users do hear change log all because of rollbar. Check them out at roar.com changelog and we're hosted on Linode cloud servers. Head to linode.com changelog check them out. Support this show. This episode is hosted by Daniel White Knack and Chris Benson. The music is by Breakmaster Cylinder and you can Find more shows just like this@change law.com when you go there. Pop in your email address. Get our weekly email keeping you up to date with the news and podcast for the developers in your inbox every single week. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week.