Report: Google Increases Chinese Employment to Work on Artificial Intelligence

Google is reportedly hiring more workers in China to work on the development of artificial intelligence.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Silicon Valley behemoth has recently posted at least four AI-related jobs on its career site in Beijing, including a technical lead to develop a team to work on natural language processing, data compression and other machine learning technologies.”

“There are nearly 60 positions available in Beijing and Shanghai combined on the company’s careers web page,” they continued. “A person familiar with the positions said Google is focused on hiring top talent and improving the quality of its algorithms.”

The report adds that two of the listed jobs “are related to machine learning in Google’s cloud-computing operation,” despite the fact that Google Cloud “currently doesn’t operate in China.”

“The company would need a local partner and special licenses to establish the business here,” explained The Wall Street Journal‘s Alyssa Abkowitz and Liza Lin.

Kitty Fok, China’s managing director at the IDC consulting firm, cited the fact that “China has a lot of data from mobile payments, gaming, social, search and news” as the reason Google wants to more forward in the country.

“Technology companies like Google are keen to learn what’s going on and getting large amounts of data to create AI algorithms is very important to them,” she proclaimed.

As reported by Bloomberg Technology, “Google defied the Chinese government in 2010 when it said it would no longer self-censor content and redirected mainland users to an unfiltered Hong Kong site.”

“Its search engine and most of the company’s other services, such as Gmail, were later blocked even as its Android grew to become the country’s most popular mobile software,” Bloomberg Technology explained, adding that other major technology platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also banned in the country.

In March, Google Translate was made available in China again, prompting “speculation that the internet giant was mending fences with Beijing.”

However, in May, the Chinese government attempted to stop its citizens from watching Google A.I. defeat the world’s best Go champion.