The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly focused on Chinese booming technology is a great read. Contrary to popular belief, China's advantage is more subtle than just having loads of data. Data alone are not much for training world-class AI/ML models. It must be first labelled and China has enough of cheap labour to do this efficiently. In fact, according to its IPO prospectus, Megvil Technology (a Chinese tech company, backed by inter alia Alibaba and Ant Financial, that designs image recognition and deep-learning software), has spent over $30m on labelled data in the past 3 years!