When I graduated from engineering college, my friends were happily joining companies like Wipro and Infosys at salaries good for the time.
They were engaged primarily in tasks like porting current software applications from one system to another, like from Oracle to MS SQL Server. Many were then going on to US to take up projects there as employees of the Indian company. Many then went on to join other companies in US and to even take up US citizenship. Those were rosy times, or so we believed.
And we believed that we had already won the race to become a software superpower. Leaving China et al far behind.
And what was China doing at the time? It was banning Google and many others. Effectively forcing its countrymen to make alternatives to these seemingly indispensable softwares – Google search, Google Maps and many other. China kept on sending its top students to the best Western universities. They came back and continued to increase the country’s tech competence. And we were blissfully ignorant. We were in our own bubble.
China would have coasted along. Were it not for a Sputnik moment, a slap in face, which it faced in 2017 and then even more severely, in 2018.
China’s “Sputnik moment” for AI came in October 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top human Go players — a moment that shocked Chinese leadership and AI researchers. As if this was not enought, this was followed by the 2017 match between AlphaGo and China’s top Go player, Ke Jie, during the Future of Go Summit held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province. AlphaGo won 3 – nil.
Go (known as Weiqi in China) is a game deeply embedded in Chinese culture and history. Witnessing an AI defeat their top player was a profound moment of realization about the rapid advancements in AI technology. The Chinese government recognized the strategic importance of AI and, shortly after, in July 2017, released the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” aiming to make China the world leader in AI by 2030.
Chinese government resolved to pour billions into these initiatives. Its researchers and tech companies joined this effort with enthusiasm and elan.
A word about Go. It is interesting to note that the software Deep Blue from IBM defeated the chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. But it was nowhere near top level competence in Go. Go is a board game with 19×19 = 361 positions. Significantly more than the 64 of chess. There are normally 150-200 legal moves from which a player has to choose. As compared to 30-35 for a chess player. The possible board positions are a stagerring 10 raised to 761! It is vastly bigger than the number of atoms in the entire known universe!
Imagine:
• You have a supercomputer that can analyze 1 trillion (10¹²) Go positions every second.
• You run it non-stop for the entire age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years ≈ 10¹⁷ seconds).
That computer would only check:
10¹² × 10¹⁷ = 10²⁹ positions — a speck compared to 10⁷⁶¹ !!!
So we can see that brute force is no way to tackle this game.
And yet AI was able to defeat the world’s top players in Go. A good 19-20 years after asserting its supremacy in chess.
And that is why China was stunned. That is why it was a Sputnik moment for China. Just as it was for US when the USSR-made Sputnik beat it in the race to space.
And today, China is a major power in AI. Multiple Chinese companies have developed AI systems. Like say ERNIE from Baidu, Tongyi Qianwen by Alibaba, surveillance AI by Hikvision and of course, DeepSeek which showed that it could bring comparable results to the table as Western models with just one-tenth the computing power.
Chinese are into specialised areas of AI – like for surveillance, for healthcare, for self-driving cars, for voice AI, military AI etc.
The current Indian govt. has to take this up head on and do the needful so that India advances to best-in-the-world levels in technology and AI.