Some types of technology seem perfectly designed for fast followers. These competitors may not be on the leading edge of a new idea but can react fast enough to stake out a large part of the new market for themselves. The rise of machine learning looks like one such innovation — and China has positioned itself to become the fast follower to beat in this defining technology of the AI revolution.

Just two or three years ago, this still looked like the narrowest of fields. The most advanced form of the art, called deep learning, emanated from work at just three North American universities. The people behind those breakthroughs decamped to jobs at places such as Google and Facebook. Upstarts such as DeepMind in London (now part of Google) and OpenAI in San Francisco became centres for some of the most advanced research.

But now the basic techniques of machine learning — algorithms that become smarter as they are trained on large amounts of data — are well understood. And it turns out that this is a general purpose technology that can be applied to almost any problem.