Caution urged in weighing up AI starts

Chinese investors are scrambling to pour their money into artificial intelligence. But they also need to be careful and distinguish in the flood of business plans between the doubtful AI-enabled startups and those with real potential, experts in the field cautioned.

Investors, additionally, warned that startup entrepreneurs should concentrate on meeting a specific demand in a particular sector, rather than being unfocused and over-ambitious towards an industry.

Xu Jian, director of iLive Future Lab at Tsinghua SEM X-elerator, an incubator based in Beijing, is looking for opportunities in machine perception, including speech and facial recognition.