It is meaningful if the US is ahead of any cooperating bloc of powers in any covered area of image recognition. This is much broader than being ahead of specifically China on the whole. For it to not be true would essentially imply that no new research is happening in the US.

I doubt the US is ahead in this area. China gains heaps upon heaps or practical experience in CV by sheer virtue of the breadth of its surveillance networks. Not to say we aren't doing the same here in the US, but efforts seem to be much more scattered

I can see the surveillance network providing vastly more training data. But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms?

Or is it that training data provides experience, which improves the algorithms? Or the application of the algorithms?

It’s a positive loop. More effective surveillance network -> Larger investment (from government or government contract) -> more application/startup/new programs -> more research funding/aggressive hiring -> higher recognition for CV/ML researchers/Engineers -> More and more people doing CV/ML -> More data, algorithms and applications-> more effective surveillance network. Btw it got deployed at scale in real world which is a huge advantage for progressing any CVML research

Not to mention nowadays Deep learning is pretty much a big data game.

> But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms?

Assuming it is - China is also competitive on developing algorithms. A few months ago there was a post on explosion of AI papers submitted by authors at Chinese research institutions, with no signs of slowing down.

It's not just availability of data for training networks; I was mainly referring to practical engineering know-how built by field experience

No there isn't. ImageNet 2017 was won by a Chinese startup, for example.

They use it for flight check-ins, entering the park, giving you a fine instantly for jaywalking, buying a soda from a vending machine, any many more use cases. I assume they are ahead.

I think this speaks more about the government and the acceptance of such things by the population rather than the state of research. Even in a hypothetical scenario of US being far ahead of China in the field at the moment, i do not see this kind of things going over well at all with the public in the US.

It gives opportunities to practice with the tech in ways US can't which might make them gain a lead.

More opportunities != being ahead.

Given two research labs, with one having a bit better equipment, while the other having a more proven history of publishing innovative research, it would be disingenuous to say that the better equipped lab is ahead until they have actually produced some research that puts them ahead. It might help them gain lead, but it also might result in nothing. Better equipment is just one of many components that affect the chances of success. Until that lead is acquired, I don't really think it would be appropriate to say that they had done so.

Note: the lab with a history of published innovative research in my analogy isn't supposed to represent the US or any country in specific. This was just an example to better illustrate the point I was making. The only thing that should matter for whether someone is ahead or not in this situation is the actual proof of being ahead, not "the opportunities that could lead to them being ahead". Otherwise, we should also start immediately trusting all those articles that pop up once every few months about how some random city is "about to become the next Silicon Valley, here are the reasons why".

Considering even Chinese kids are building drones with AI driven aimbots for fun in their spare time, I highly doubt it. https://www.robomaster.com

Anecdotally even number and quality of publications/papers by Chinese in English outperform the entire English speaking region. They probably publish a lot more in their native scripts.

Most of the time whatever interesting thing (posted to HN) originated in some Chinese startup/university.

But that's just my gut feel.