About this episode
The United States has blacklisted several Chinese AI companies working in facial recognition and surveillance. Why? What are these companies doing exactly, and how does this fit into the international politics of AI? We dig into these questions and attempt to do some live fact finding in this episode. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token . Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com . Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com . Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Show Notes: 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in “re-education camps” Surge in Chinese research related to surveillance of Muslim minorities US AI Blacklist summary article from MIT Technology Review Hikvision Their website Here’s what you need to know about Hikvision, the camera maker behind China’s mass surveillance system China’s Hikvision Has Probably Filmed You iFlytek Their website Why 500 Million People in China Are Talking to This AI Megvii Their website Behind the Rise of China’s Facial-Recognition Giants Megvii, the Chinese startup unicorn known for facial recognition tech, files to go public in Hong Kong Yitu Their website AI Startup Yitu Seeks IPO on China’s New Tech Board This Chinese facial recognition start-up can identify a person in seconds Learning resources: TensorFlow 2.0 notebook Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!