Google Developer Days China 2017

China's government is laser-focused on controlling everything that happens within the country, and that means strict rules for foreign companies attempting to operate there. It's also why access to Google's most popular services are for the most part blocked in China. However, that hasn't stopped Google announcing a new AI research center located in Beijing.

The announcement was made during the Google Developer Days China 2017 via a Google Blog post by Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist for AI and machine learning at Google Cloud. The so-called Google AI China Center is just the latest such center, with others already established in London, New York, Toronto, and Zurich.

So why did Google choose to setup an AI center where its services are blocked? It comes down to talent. As Li points out in her blog post, "China is home to many of the world's top experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. All three winning teams of the ImageNet Challenge in the past three years have been largely composed of Chinese researchers. Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015."

China is clearly a hotbed of artificial intelligence research and Google would be foolish to not dip into that pool. And just because the new center is located in Beijing, it doesn't mean the work they do will be restricted to China. It should also be much easier to comply with local rules and laws because this is R&D, not a public-facing service.

Google China's existing engineering teams will now support the new AI center, with the focus being on Google Cloud AI. There are also 20 new roles to fill in Beijing following this announcement, and Google is making funding available to fund local AI conferences and workshops as well as sponsoring interesting projects and further research.