Coding competition? ? ? ? ? Dec 7th 2017
Artificial intelligence looks?tailor-made for incumbent tech giants. Is that a worry?
（開題拋出問題呛凶，AI 人工智能看起來像是給科技大公司量身訂造的，這樣會不會有問題刀森？incumbent 這個詞也是在經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人里學(xué)的）
TWO letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A; deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”.
（兩個字就值千金拄轻！AI無疑是2017年度投資最熱的一項偎捎！
2017年9個月就投了76億美金，而2016年整年才54億美金）
At the heart of the frenzy are some familiar names: the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.A similar, though less transparent, battle is under way in China among firms like Alibaba and Baidu. Several have put AI at the centre of their strategies. All are enthusiastic acquirers of AI firms, often in order to snap up the people they employ. They see AI as a way to improve their existing services, from cloud computing to logistics, and to push into new areas, from autonomous cars to augmented reality.Many observers fear that, by cementing and extending the power of a handful of giants, AI will hurt competition. That will depend on three open questions,involving one magic ingredient.
( frenzy: great and often wild or uncontrolled activity
國外像google、亞馬遜闰集、Apple等公司都投入巨大資金研究人工智能瘫筐，國內(nèi)則是百度和阿里爸爸等蜜暑，還被順帶被黑了一下， less transparent
人工智能輔助提高方方面面策肝，云存儲肛捍、物流、再到新領(lǐng)域無人駕駛等）
AlphaGone
（這部分的標(biāo)題都mean了）
The tech giants certainly have big advantages in the battle to develop AI. They have tonnes of data,oodles ofcomputing power and boffins aplenty—especially in China, which expects to charge ahead. Imagine a future, some warn, in which you are transported everywhere in a Waymo autonomous car (owner: Alphabet, parent of Google), pay for everything with an Android phone (developer: Google), watch YouTube (owner: Google) to relax, and search the web using—you can guess. Markets with just a handful of firms can be fiercely competitive. A world in which the same few namesduke it outin several industries could still be a good one for consumers. But if people rely on one firm’s services like this,and if AI enables that firm to predict their needs and customise its offering ever more precisely, it will beburdensometo switch to a rival.
（ 大公司掌控的數(shù)據(jù)和資源很多之众，他們能在AI大戰(zhàn)中輕松勝出拙毫，國內(nèi)寡頭更少
oodles of：informal-- a large amount of something
想象一下，出行用google的無人駕駛車棺禾，付款用google開發(fā)的安卓手機缀蹄，看youtube 放松，然后搜索的話...能想到也是用google
duke out: informal-- to fight with your fists
市場有一些競爭者是好的膘婶，如果AI讓那公司可以預(yù)測顧客需求和量身訂造給他們服務(wù)缺前，那將會很難很難再改變到另外一個競爭者的身上了）
That future is still a long way off.AI programs remain narrowly focused. Moreover, the ability of theincumbents to perpetuate their advantagesismade uncertain bythree questions.
The most important is whether AI will always depend on vast amounts of data. Machines today are usually trained on huge datasets, from which they can recognise useful patterns such as fraudulent financial transactions.If real-world data remain essential to AI, the tech superstars are in clover.They have vast amounts of the stuff,and are gaining more as they push into fresh areas such as health care.
（人工智能現(xiàn)在應(yīng)用很局限，科技寡頭們能不能“長生不死” 還是未知數(shù)
perpetuate：to cause something that should be stopped such as a mistaken idea or a bad situation to continue 我把它理解為長生不死悬襟，這個詞的解釋感覺是貶義詞衅码，用在這里真的是有的點刻薄了~ 這些寫手們真的so mean
最重要的未知因素是人工智能在將來還是不是依賴大量數(shù)據(jù)，如果是的話脊岳，這些寡頭們就可以繼續(xù)地躺在安樂椅上哈哈笑了
clover: a small plant that has usuallly three leaves on each stem and that usually has round flowers that are white,red or puple 三葉草
in clover:過舒適奢侈的生活? ?再一次so mean~）
A competing vision of AI stresses simulations, in which machines teach themselves using synthetic data or in virtual environments. Early versions of a program developed to play Go, an Asian board game, by DeepMind, a unit of Alphabet, were trained using data from actual games; the latest was simply given the rules and started playing Go against itself. Within three days it had surpassed its predecessor,which had itself beaten the best player humanity couldmuster. If this approachis widely applicable, or if future AI systems can be trained usingsparseramounts of data,the tech giants’ edge is blunted.
（那個和世界冠軍下圍棋的機器人原來是靠從實戰(zhàn)的數(shù)據(jù)中來取勝逝段，后來就只給一些規(guī)則給它，它自己和自己對戰(zhàn)割捅，很快就贏了奶躯。 如果人工智能不用大數(shù)據(jù)來支持的話，那科技寡頭的優(yōu)勢就會少一點了）
But some applications will always require data. How much of the world’s stock of it the tech giants will end up controlling is the second question. They have clout in the consumer realm, and they keep pushing into new areas, from Amazon’s interest in medicine to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, a professional-networking site. But data in the corporate realm are harder to get at, and their value is increasingly well understood. Autonomous cars will be a good test. Alphabet’s Waymo has done more real-world testing of self-driving cars than any other firm: over 4m miles(6.5m kilometres) on public roads. But establishedcarmakers, and startups like Tesla, can generate more data from their existing fleets; other firms, like Mobileye, a driverless-tech firm owned by Intel, are also in the race.
（第二個問題就是這些寡頭手里最后到底能控制多少占比的數(shù)據(jù)亿驾？
這一段不太好理解嘹黔，是說有些領(lǐng)域不單單要收集人的數(shù)據(jù)，還要收集實際路上的數(shù)據(jù)莫瞬？）
The third questionis how openly knowledge will be shared. The tech giants’ ability to recruit AIexpertise from universities is helped by their willingness to publish research;Google and Facebook have opened software libraries to outside developers. But their incentives to share valuable data and algorithms are weak. Much will depend on whether regulations prise open their grip. Europe’s impending data-protection rules, for example, require firms to get explicit consent for how they use dataand to make it easier for customers to transfer their information to other providers.China may try to help its firms by having negligible regulation.
（第三個問題就是這些數(shù)據(jù)和知識的共享開放程度有多大儡蔓。google 和facebook都有開放軟件圖書館給外界的程序員醉锄，但是有價值的數(shù)據(jù)和算法則是“不給看的”）
The battle in AI is fiercest among the tech giants. It is too early to know how good that will be for competition, but not to anticipate the magic ingredient that will determinethe outcome:the importance, accessibility and openness of data.
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Results
Lexile?Measure: 1000L - 1100L
Mean Sentence Length: 14.64
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.20
Word Count: 776
這篇文章的藍(lán)思值是在1100-1100L， 適合英語專業(yè)大二大三的水平學(xué)習(xí)浙值，應(yīng)該是經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)人里屬于最簡單的一列恳不。
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