Do you follow ML ? A lot of big-impact papers in Computer vision has come directly from mainland China and Hong Kong. MSRA, CUHK, Sensetime, and Baidu have made quite a few advances in the field.DMLC a group of members composed mostly of Chinese students basically wrote things like MXNET and Xgboost.

Granted most of these are collaborative ventures, but calling China 'catching up' at this stage is ignorant.

And yet nearly all SOTA research is done in the US.

Eventually folks in China realize they could easily be making $500K+/yr at FANG and be financially independent in 10 years, so they leave for the much, much greener US pastures, and stay here.

Here's an example, these are the golden standard. Which would be the US equivalent?

https://www.dji.com/gr/products/drones

Here's another -- better than Google by a wide margin:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/1/18290215/huawei-p30-pro-ca...

DJI is impressive - but is DJI leading because of AI? To me, that is mostly manufacturing. And this is indeed an area where "the west" is severly lacking. (Disclaimer: I am no drone expert, so this is a real question)

The verge says the camera is "...somehow even better than Google’s Night Sight". That is nice - but not a "wide margin".

>DJI is impressive - but is DJI leading because of AI?

No. But I was answering the parent comment "...in what area is China actually leading?" -- not specifically about AI. And those are just 2 examples I'm familiar with personally (as a consumer). There could be tons of others.

>The verge says the camera is "...somehow even better than Google’s Night Sight". That is nice - but not a "wide margin".

No, the Verge gushes over the camera throughout the review. You just read the subtitle ("somehow even better"), but missed their qualification of how much better it is in the review:

"I spent this past weekend comparing its camera against Google’s Pixel 3 and struggling to believe my eyes"

"The Pixel shot is, by any other standards, impressive. The P30 Pro is simply in another league, and the quality of its photo doesn’t require explanation."

"The less light there is in an image, the stronger Huawei’s P30 Pro advantage grows. In the following example, featuring an unlit bathroom where my eyes could detect shapes but no colors, the P30 Pro does the unbelievable by actually focusing and producing a very respectable image. With 30 seconds of editing in Google Photos, I can make it look like it was taken in the daytime. The Pixel attempt, by comparison, is out of focus. The Pixel, like the vast majority of mobile and even pro DSLR cameras, can’t obtain focus with so little."

1) Huawei phone has more cameras and sensors 2) Google's version is ~6months old

So yeah, some caveats there

I don't think Google couldn't put more cameras (or that the cameras make the real difference, this is an algorithmic ML matter -- expensive DSLRs with fast lenses and still can't do it as well).

Or that Huawei developed all this in the span of 6 months that Google put out theirs. They were developing it before Google released their version.