中國人臉識別初創公司

China’s facial recognition start-ups are attracting big investments at a time when Silicon Valley’s giants are facing a backlash over their use of the technology.

中國的面部識別初創企業正在吸引大量投資，而此時硅谷巨頭們對這項技術的使用正面臨反彈。

In the past week, Chinese facial recognition companies, according to a pair of reports, were close to raising as much as $1.6 billion. Those investments would build on billions of dollars that investors have already put into the companies.

根據兩份報道，在過去的一週，中國面部識別公司籌集了將近16億美元（約合106億元人民幣）的資金。這些投資將建立在投資者已經投入這些公司的數十億美元基礎上。

The investments reflect facial recognition’s embrace by Beijing, which has created a better environment for companies to test the technology than in the West. And that could help China deploy advanced systems faster and more broadly than America.

這些投資反映了北京對面部識別的認可，這爲企業測試這項技術創造了比西方更好的環境。這可能有助於中國比美國更快、更廣泛地部署先進系統。

SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund was seeking a $1 billion stake in SenseTime, an artificial intelligence company in Beijing, Bloomberg reported last week, citing anonymous sources. SenseTime makes facial recognition software used in applications like monitoring CCTV footage and checking a consumer’s likeness to validate digital payments.

據彭博(Bloomberg)上週援引匿名消息來源報道，軟銀(SoftBank)的1000億美元願景基金(Vision Fund)正在尋求獲得北京人工智能公司商湯科技10億美元（約合66億元人民幣）的股份。商湯科技製作的面部識別軟件可用於監控攝像頭，還有檢查消費者的相貌相似性以驗證數字支付。

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that, according to anonymous sources, the Chinese A.I. company Megvii would close a $600 million funding round “within weeks.” Alibaba and Hong Kong-based Boyu Capital are expected to contribute. Megvii is the developer of Face++, the facial recognition system already used in China to grant or deny people access to buildings, or check if the driver of a Didi ride-hailing car is legitimate, among other things.

彭博在週一報道稱，根據匿名消息來源，中國人工智能公司曠視科技將“在幾周內”完成一輪6億美元的融資。預計會有阿里巴巴和總部位於香港的博裕資本的參與。曠視科技是Face++的開發者，這是一種面部識別系統，在中國已經被用來允許或拒絕人們進入建築物，或者覈查滴滴打車司機背景等等。

SenseTime has already raised over $1.6 billion in funding since it was founded in 2014, according to data from S & P Global Market Intelligence, and as recently as May was valued at about $4.5 billion. Investors included Alibaba and Bank of China as well as the American firms Qualcomm, Silver Lake, Tiger Global Management and Fidelity International.

根據標普全球市場財智(S&P Global Market Intelligence)的數據，自2014年成立以來，商湯科技已經籌集了超過16億美元（約合106億元人民幣）的資金，在5月得到了45億美元（約合300億元人民幣）的估值。投資者包括阿里巴巴和中國銀行，以及美國公司高通(Qualcomm)、銀湖資本(Silver Lake)、老虎環球(Tiger Global Management)和富達國際(Fidelity International)。

Megvii’s previous funding round raised $460 million from Chinese companies like Foxconn and Ant Financial, as well as several domestic investment funds. It also received money from the Moscow-based Russian Direct Investment Fund and South Korea’s SK Group.

曠視科技的上一輪融資由富士康和螞蟻金服等中國公司以及幾家國內投資基金籌集了4.6億美元（約合31億元人民幣）。它還得到了總部設在莫斯科的俄羅斯直接投資基金(Russian Direct Investment Fund)和韓國SK集團的投資。

The facial recognition systems being built by SenseTime and Megvii use artificial intelligence to discern individuals from one another in images or video, by studying libraries of existing content. It is one of the more established machine learning techniques, which means that it has found some practical application in consumer products — such as Apple’s Face ID, which allows a user to unlock his or her iPhone by looking at it, or Facebook’s tools, which can recognize users in uploaded images.

商湯科技和曠視科技正在打造的面部識別系統通過研究現有內容庫，利用人工智能來識別圖像或視頻中的個體。這是一種更成熟的機器學習技術，這意味着它已經在消費產品中找到了一些實際的應用方式——比如蘋果的Face ID，它允許用戶看着iPhone將其解鎖，或者可以在上傳圖像中識別用戶的Facebook工具。

Such software has proved controversial because of the privacy issues that it raises. Law enforcement’s use of it to identify criminals or track citizens, in particular, has drawn pushback.

事實證明，這種軟件會帶來爭議，因爲它引發了隱私問題。執法部門利用信息技術識別罪犯或追蹤公民的做法尤其遭到了抵制。

But even if its citizens have such concerns, China’s government wants to use facial recognition to create a vast national surveillance system. And it has created an environment to foster its development.

但即使中國公民有這樣的擔憂，中國政府也希望利用面部識別來建立一個龐大的國家監控系統。爲此它創造了一個促進其發展的環境。

The country’s push to become a technological powerhouse has created a wave of promising A.I. start-ups. Its desire to track its citizens has also meant that many of them have focused specifically on image recognition. And there are close ties between many of these start-ups and the government, which allows companies to apply their software to huge state data sets. The chief executive of SenseTime, which has contracts with the Police Department in Chongqing and China Mobile, told The Financial Times in January that the company had “processed 500 million identities for facial recognition. U.S. companies can’t test on so many customers.”

該國成爲技術強國的努力，已經創造了一批有前景的人工智能初創企業。中國對追蹤其公民的渴望也意味着，這些公司中有許多會特別關注圖像識別。許多這樣的初創企業與政府有着密切的聯繫，政府允許公司將它們的軟件應用於龐大的國家數據集。商湯科技的首席執行官在1月份告訴《金融時報》(The Financial Times)，該公司已經“處理了5億個面部識別身份。美國公司無法對這麼多客戶進行測試，”這家公司已經與重慶市警察局和中國移動簽訂了合同。

Similar arrangements have existed in the United States. But American technology companies have recently run into resistance when working with government agencies.

美國也有類似的安排。但美國的科技公司最近在與政府機構合作時遇到了阻力。

Amazon endured heavy lobbying from shareholders, the American Civil Liberties Union and staff about the use of its Rekognition software by police to identify people. Microsoft, too, has suffered blowback over a project to help develop A.I. for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And Google ultimately decided not to renew a contract with the Pentagon that called for using image recognition to improve the performance of drone operations.

亞馬遜(Amazon)受到了股東、美國公民自由聯盟(American Civil Liberties Union)和工作人員的大力勸說，阻礙該公司允許警方使用其Rekognition軟件來識別身份。微軟(Microsoft)的一個項目也遭遇了反擊，該項目旨在幫助美國移民與海關執法局(Immigration and Customs Enforcement)開發人工智能工具。谷歌(Google)最終決定不與五角大樓續簽合同，後者希望使用圖像識別來改進無人機的行動。

In the wake of those criticisms, Microsoft has actually called on Congress to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.

事實上，在遭到這些批評之後，微軟已經呼籲國會監管面部識別技術的使用。

The nature of A.I. means that software systems can be improved by crunching through larger and larger data sets that can be provided by the government — from things like CCTV footage, driving license images, and more. China’s start-ups, then, are enjoying the benefits of improving their technology inside projects that America’s tech giants might be lobbying their own way out of.

人工智能的性質決定了軟件系統可以通過處理政府——從閉路電視錄像、駕照圖片等等來源——提供的越來越大的數據集得以改進。因此，當美國的科技巨頭可能正爲了脫離這種項目而四處遊說的同時，中國的初創企業正享受着在這些項目中改進技術的好處。