Hi, it's Mark Bergen, the reporter who covers Google. Peter Thiel can be persistent. President Trump's favorite technologist suggested last month that the CIA should probe Google for being infiltrated by Chinese spies. Trump's Treasury Secretary shot this down. Now Thiel has taken to the New York Times to bash Google's artificial intelligence strategy and corporate ethos as "bad for America." We don't need an investigation, he writes, since the affront is in plain sight:
A.I.'s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America's leading software company, Google — starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon — is shocking ... Perhaps the most charitable word for these twin decisions would be to call them naïve.
Google's trysts in China are interesting! Kai-Fu Lee, the Chinese venture capitalist, has written that the China tour from DeepMind, the Google research lab Thiel cites, was a "Sputnik moment" that prompted China's hefty national investment in AI technology.
But Thiel's argument is flimsy. Not just because he singles out Alphabet Inc.'s Google without context—Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. both run AI labs in China too, and they sell cloud-computing services there, something Google does not. It's flimsy because Thiel glosses over Google's biggest contribution to AI in China. That would be Tensorflow, a free, open-source coding library for machine learning that Google manages and promotes. Tensorflow provides the computing backbone for tech like facial-recognition and self-driving cars.
In September, Google boasted in Shanghai that more than two million Tensorflow downloads came from China. (Google hasn't shared new numbers.) Here is a Google website noting how China Mobile, the nation's largest carrier, used Tensorflow to automatically "detect network anomalies." It sounds mundane. But for Thiel and White House hawks, any technical assistance to China Inc. is a collaboration with China's military. (Read my colleague Lizette Chapman to understand more behind Thiel's attacks on China.)
Would the hawks demand Google stop offering open-source software in China? Can they?
That's grayer terrain. The Trump administration, in its crackdown on China's tech, cut off telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. from Google's Android operating system—but Huawei can still sell phones that run on the open-source version of Android it uses in China. Most Chinese developers access Tensorflow through GitHub, a code repository owned by Microsoft. So far, the White House hasn't forced Microsoft to shut that down.
Today's cutting-edge AI often isn't sold or shared, per se, but is openly available to anyone with enough coding chops and computing resources. Even Facebook Inc., on whose board Thiel sits, offers its machine learning library, Pytorch, in China.(A Facebook representative declined to share how many people in China use Pytorch.)
Restrictions could come on the open-source tools from U.S. tech in the upcoming rounds of export controls. Tech companies are fighting fiercely to relax the rules. Thiel's latest barb may hint at where the other side lands. Or it could just be another sign that he isn't letting go of his grudge against Google. A representative for Thiel did not return a request for comment.—Mark Bergen
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