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Artificial Intelligence: Million-dollar Babies
人工智能：百万美元宝贝
As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their stars
That a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year, they spent some $8.5 billion on research, deals and hiring, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.考生如果怕自己错过考试成绩查询的话，可以 免费预约短信提醒，届时会以短信的方式提醒大家报名和考试时间。
计算机程序可以反复战胜围棋世界冠军，这是人工智能这一快速发展的领域中一项极为难得的成就。然而，随着各家公司竞相把顶尖的人工智能专家招致麾下，另一场高风险游戏正在幕后展开。包括谷歌、Facebook、微软、百度在内的科技巨头争相扩展其人工智能项目。数据公司Quid表示，去年，这些科技公司花费了约85亿美元用于研究、收购及网罗人才，比2010年多四倍。
In the past universities employed the world’s best AI experts. Now tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning (where computers learn from data themselves) for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries similar to those fetched by professional athletes.
过去，大学拥有世界一流的人工智能专家。如今，科技企业正从大学的“机器人及机器学习(计算机通过数据自动学习)”系里抢夺优秀师生，以堪比职业运动员的高薪做诱饵。
Last year Uber, a taxi-hailing firm, recruited 40 of the 140 staff of the National Robotics Engineering Centre at Carnegie Mellon University, and set up a unit to work on self-driving cars. That drew headlines because Uber had earlier promised to fund research at the centre before deciding instead to peel off its staff. Other firms seek talent more quietly but just as doggedly. The migration to the private sector startles many academics. “I cannot even hold onto my grad students,” says Pedro Domingos, a professor at the University of Washington who specialises in machine learning and has himself had job offers from tech firms. “Companies are trying to hire them away before they graduate.”
美国卡耐基梅隆大学的国家机器人工程中心原本有140名教师，去年，打车公司优步从中招聘了40人，设立部门研究自动驾驶汽车。此举惹来关注，因为优步之前承诺资助该中心的研究工作，后来却转而挖角。其他公司寻觅人才的举动则相对低调，但也同样执着。人才向私营公司的流动让不少学者感到震惊。“我连自己的研究生也留不住，”华盛顿大学的佩德罗·多明戈斯教授说道，他是机器学习方面的专家，连他自己也收到了科技公司伸出的橄榄枝，“学生还没毕业，那些公司就想把他们聘走。”
Experts in machine learning are most in demand. Big tech firms use it in many activities, from basic tasks such as spam-filtering and better targeting of online advertisements, to futuristic endeavours such as self-driving cars or scanning images to identify disease. As tech giants work on features such as virtual personal-assistant technology, to help users organise their lives, or tools to make it easier to search through photographs, they rely on advances in machine learning.
机器学习领域的专家最为抢手。大型科技公司的许多任务都要运用这一技术，从一些基本任务，如过滤垃圾邮件和令网络广告更有针对性，到无人驾驶汽车或扫描图像来发现疾病等具有未来色彩的尝试，无一例外。科技巨头在研发一些产品时要依赖机器学习技术的进步，比如帮助用户安排生活的虚拟个人助理或是方便人们搜寻图片的工具。
Tech firms’ investment in this area helps to explain how a once-arcane academic gathering, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held each December in Canada, has become the Davos of AI. Participants go to learn, be seen and get courted by bosses looking for talent. Attendance has tripled since 2010, reaching 3,800 last year.
科技公司对这一领域的投资有助解释为何“神经信息处理系统大会”(每年12月在加拿大举行)这一曾被视为高深莫测的学术会议如今摇身成为人工智能界的达沃斯盛会。与会者一方面为了学习，另一方面也为了被求贤若渴的老板们发现并追捧。2010年以来，其与会人数增加了两倍，去年达到3800人。
No reliable statistics exist to show how many academics are joining tech companies. But indications exist. In the field of “deep learning”, where computers draw insights from large data sets using methods similar to a human brain’s neural networks, the share of papers written by authors with some corporate affiliation is up sharply.
学术界有多少人转投科技公司的怀抱目前仍无可靠统计数据，但有迹可循。“深度学习”是指计算机利用近似人类大脑神经网络的运作方式从大型数据集中析取知识，这一范畴的学术论文中，在企业任职的作者比例大幅上升。
Tech firms have not always lavished such attention and resources on AI experts. The field was largely ignored and underfunded during the “AI winter” of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashionable approaches to AI failed to match their early promise. The present machine-learning boom began in earnest when Google started doing deals focused on AI. In 2014, for example, it bought DeepMind, the startup behind the computer’s victory in Go, from researchers in London. The price was rumoured to be around $600m. Around then Facebook, which also reportedly hoped to buy DeepMind, started a lab focused on artificial intelligence and hired an academic from New York University, Yann LeCun, to run it.
科技公司并非一开始就对人工智能专家倾注如此多的心思和资源。在上世纪八九十年代的“人工智能寒冬”，新潮的人工智能技术未如预期，该领域被广为忽视，资金投入也不足。目前这股“机器学习”热潮是在谷歌开始收购专注人工智能技术的公司后才真正开启的。比如，2014年，谷歌从伦敦的研究人员手中收购了DeepMind，这家创业公司正是人机围棋大战中计算机取胜的幕后关键。据传当时的收购价约为六亿美元。据报道也曾有意收购DeepmMind的Facebook也在差不多同一时间建起实验室，专注研发人工智能技术，并从纽约大学请来学者燕乐存来做负责人。
The firms offer academics the chance to see their ideas reach markets quickly, which many like. Private-sector jobs can also free academics from the uncertainty of securing research grants. Andrew Ng, who leads AI research for the Chinese internet giant Baidu and used to teach full-time at Stanford, says tech firms offer two especially appealing things: lots of computing power and large data sets. Both are essential for modern machine learning.
这些公司为学者们提供机会，让其创意迅速推向市场，往往大受欢迎。私营公司的职位也令学者们不用担心研究经费不足的问题。之前在斯坦福大学全职任教的吴恩达目前效力于中国互联网巨头百度，主管人工智能研究。他表示，科技公司能提供两个特别诱人的条件：强大的计算能力和庞大的数据集。这两者为现代机器学习研究必不可少。
All that is to the good, but the hiring spree could also impose costs. One is that universities, unable to offer competitive salaries, will be damaged if too many bright minds are either lured away permanently or distracted from the lecture hall by commitments to tech firms. Whole countries could suffer, too. Most big tech firms have their headquarters in America; places like Canada, whose universities have been at the forefront of AI development, could see little benefit if their brightest staff disappear to firms over the border, says Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto.
这些都是好的方面，但挖角热潮也有代价。一方面，大学由于无法提供具有竞争力的薪酬，假如过多优秀人才被诱走，一去不返，或是忙于服务科技公司而无法专心讲学，大学将蒙受损失。同时，一些国家也可能遭罪。大型科技公司总部多在美国;像加拿大这样的国家，其大学一直处于人工智能研发的前沿，如果他们最聪明的人才都被境外公司吸引走，对本国实在毫无益处，多伦多大学的阿杰伊·阿格拉沃尔教授说道。
Another risk is if expertise in AI is concentrated disproportionately in a few firms. Tech companies make public some of their research through open sourcing. They also promise employees that they can write papers. In practice, however, many profitable findings are not shared. Some worry that Google, the leading firm in the field, could establish something close to an intellectual monopoly. Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle, which runs data-science competitions that have resulted in promising academics being hired by firms, compares Google’s pre-eminence in AI to the concentration of talented scientists who laboured on the Manhattan Project, which produced America’s atom bomb.
另一风险是人工智能技术过度集中于少数企业手中。科技公司通过开源方式公开其部分研究成果。它们也答应员工可以撰写论文。然而，实际上，许多有利可图的研究成果并未共享。有人担心，作为人工智能界领头羊的谷歌可能形成近乎知识垄断的地位。Kaggle是组织数据学竞赛的平台，不少公司通过这些比赛搜罗学术新星，该平台的安东尼·古德鲁姆将谷歌在人工智能上的卓越表现与当年集结众多科学英才在曼哈顿计划中努力工作相提并论。该计划最终为美国造出原子弹。
Office Communication: The Slack Generation
办公通讯：Slack一代
How workplace messaging could replace other missives
Stewart Butterfield, the boss of Slack, a messaging company, has been wonderfully unlucky in certain ventures. In 2002, he and a band of colleagues created an online-video game called “Game Neverending”. It never took off, but the tools they used to design it turned into Flickr, the web’s first popular photo-sharing website. Yahoo bought it in 2005 for a reported $35m.考生如果怕自己错过考试成绩查询的话，可以 免费预约短信提醒，届时会以短信的方式提醒大家报名和考试时间。
通讯工具公司Slack的老板斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德在一些创业经历中上可谓因祸得福。2002年，他和一群同事创办了名为“游戏无止境”的网络视频游戏。该产品并未成功，但他们用来设计游戏的工具后来却发展成为互联网首个广受欢迎的照片分享网站Flickr，后于2005年被雅虎收购，据称出价达3500万美元。
Four years later Mr. Butterfield tried to create another online game, called Glitch. It flopped as well. But Mr. Butterfield and his team developed an internal messaging system to collaborate on it, which became the basis for Slack. In Silicon Valley, such a change in strategy is called a “pivot”; anywhere else it is called good fortune. Today, Slack is one of the fastest-rising startups around, with $540m in funding and a valuation of around $3.8 billion. “I guess the lesson should be, pursue your dream and hope it fails, so you can do something else,” says Cal Henderson, Slack’s chief technology officer.
四年后，巴特菲尔德试图创办另一款名为Glitch的网络游戏，同样以失败告终。但巴特菲尔德和他的团队在创业过程中开发了一个内部通讯系统用于协作，奠定了Slack的基础。在硅谷，这种战略上的转变被称为“转型”，要是放在其他任何地方都会被称为运气。今天，Slack已成为上升最快的创业公司之一，融资5.4亿美元，估值约为38亿美元。“我想这给我们的经验是，追逐梦想，希望梦想失败，这样你就可以做点儿别的了。”Slack的首席技术官卡尔·亨德森说道。
It is rare for business software to arouse emotion besides annoyance. But some positively gush about how Slack has simplified office communication. Instead of individual e-mails arriving in a central inbox and requiring attention, Slack structures textual conversations within threads (called “channels”) where groups within firms can update each other in real time. It is casual and reflects how people actually communicate, eschewing e-mail’s outdated formalities, says Chris Becherer of Pandora, an online-music firm that uses Slack.
办公软件很少能唤起什么情绪，除了厌烦之外。但有人对Slack赞不绝口，称其简化了办公通讯。Slack不是把电子邮件都堆在一个收件箱里让人处理，而是按话题(称为“频道”)组织文本对话，便于公司中的团队实时沟通。这种形式较为随意，反映出人们的实际沟通方式，并且避免了电子邮件那套过时的形式，在线音乐公司潘多拉的克里斯·贝赫勒说道，该公司就使用Slack进行办公通讯。
Its other selling-point is efficiency. A survey of users, admittedly conducted by the firm itself, suggests that team productivity increases by around a third when they start using the software, primarily by reducing internal e-mail and meetings. Slack has decided to open itself up to other apps, becoming a platform by which employees can log into and use other software tools. Today it has 2.7m daily active users, up from 1m last June. Around 800,000 of them are paying subscribers; their firms pay around $80 or more a year for each employee using the service. The firm has $75m in annual recurring revenue and is breaking even, says Mr. Butterfield.
它的另一个卖点是效率。Slack自己做的用户调查显示，在使用该软件后，团队效率提升近三分之一，主要是由于内部邮件及会议的减少。Slack已决定向其他应用开放，成为企业员工可以登陆并使用其他软件工具的平台。去年六月时，该软件的日活跃用户为100万，目前已上升至270万，其中约有80万是付费用户，公司为每位使用服务的员工支付至少80美元的年费。巴特菲尔德表示，Slack的年度经常性收入为7500万美元，公司正逐渐实现收支平衡。
Slack’s rise points to three important changes in the workplace. First, people are completing work across different devices from wherever they are, so they need software that can work seamlessly on mobile devices. Messaging naturally lends itself to this format. Second, communication is becoming more open. Just as offices went from closed, hived-off rooms to open-plan, Slack is the virtual equivalent, fostering a collaborative work environment, says Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm, a consultancy. Slack’s default setting is to make conversations public within a firm.
Slack的崛起昭示着职场的三个重要变化。首先，人们现在会在不同地点，通过各种设备来完成工作，所以他们需要能在移动设备上无缝运作的软件。发送消息天生适合这种形式。第二，通讯正变得越来越开放。正如办公室从封闭小隔间变为开放式空间一样，Slack在虚拟领域引领着同样的变革，打造协同工作环境，咨询公司Ribbonfarm的文卡泰什·拉奥说道。Slack的默认设置就是让员工在公司内公开对话。
Third, software firms are trying to automate functions that used to be done by people in order to make employees more productive. Slack has made a big push into “bots”, algorithms that can automate menial tasks which used to be done by humans. Slack offers bots that compile lunch orders and projects’ progress reports, or generate analytics on demand. In the future employees will be able to chat with software agents to get more done, working alongside bots as well as their peers.
第三，软件公司正尝试把以往需要人工处理的职能自动化，借此提高员工的工作效率。Slack已大量运用“机器人”， 这些算法可以自动完成以往需要人工处理的低级工作。Slack提供的机器人服务包括确定午餐订单，编写项目进度报告，以及按需生成分析等。未来，员工将可与“软件员工”对话，与这些机器人和同事并肩工作，取得更多成果。
Mr. Butterfield is not the typical leader of a striving startup. Called “Dharma” by his hippie parents, he spent his early years on a commune with no running water or electricity; he changed his name to Daniel Stewart when he was 12. A self-professed introvert, which is fitting for a company that sells itself on textual communication, he values efficiency and candour. After Yahoo bought Flickr, he worked there for a few years. “Everything was horrible, ugly, slow, difficult to use and confusing,” he says, frankly.
巴特菲尔德不是那种典型的拼搏型创业企业领袖。被嬉皮士父母称为“达摩”的他，早年生活在一个没有自来水或电力的公社中;12岁的时候他把自己的名字改为丹尼尔·斯图尔特。他自称性格内向——这恰恰适合靠文本通讯谋生的公司——并且珍视效率和坦诚。雅虎收购Flickr之后，他在那里工作了几年。“一切都很可怕、丑陋、缓慢、难用、混乱。”他毫不掩饰地说道。
Dharma chameleon
达摩变色龙
In retrospect, Flickr was sold too soon. The sale marked the beginning of the technology industry’s resurgence after its crash in the early 2000s. Now, Mr. Butterfield has a second chance. Investors do not want to see him sell Slack too early. Earlier this year there were reports that Microsoft considered bidding around $8 billion for the company. Mr. Butterfield says that Slack has never received a formal offer from anyone and is planning to go public. Last year it started submitting itself to voluntary audits, in what appears to be preparation for a public debut. But it seems even more likely that a large tech giant will see the strategic value of Slack and try to snap it up first for an even splashier sum.
回想起来，当年卖Flickr卖得太早了。那一次并购标志着科技产业在经历21世纪初崩溃后的复苏。如今巴特菲尔德有了第二次机会。投资者不愿意看到他过早卖掉Slack。今年早些时候有报道称，微软考虑出价80亿美元收购该公司。巴特菲尔德则表示从未收到任何人的正式报价，而公司正计划上市。去年，公司做了一次外部审计，似乎是为公开上市准备。但貌似可能性更大的是某家科技巨头会意识到Slack的战略价值，以更高的出价抢先将其收归麾下。
Mr. Butterfield says that Slack could achieve $10 billion in revenue if it signs up 100m knowledge workers, of which there are around 850m worldwide. That is far easier said than done. For one thing, Slack still needs to woo larger companies outside the technology world. Currently it holds particular appeal among workers at firms in the internet, media and advertising industries, and among teams of software developers within larger firms. Conquering traditional businesses may prove harder. Slack’s yearly minimum of $80 per employee is steep for companies with tens of thousands of workers.
巴特菲尔德表示，假如全球约8.5亿的知识型劳动者中有一亿成为Slack的付费用户，那么公司的年收入将达到100亿美元。这说起来容易，实际难度却大得多。一方面，Slack还须博取非科技业大公司的青睐。目前，Slack特别受互联网、媒体、广告公司员工的欢迎，大公司内部软件开发团队的员工也很爱用。但征服传统公司可能会更难。Slack每人80美元的最低年费对拥有数以万计员工的企业来说是一项不菲的开支。
For another, Slack has rising competition to fend off. Already, rival products are taking aim at the market for workplace collaboration, including one, Atlassian, from an Australian software company, which is called HipChat, and bundled with its other services. There is also Symphony, a rival startup backed by several banks that specialises in highly regulated industries such as financial services, which require more compliance controls. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook have collaborative work apps, but these are only modestly successful.
另一方面，Slack还要抵御不断加剧的竞争。已有不少竞争产品瞄准办公协作的市场，其中包括澳大利亚软件公司Atlassian推出的HipChat，该产品还捆绑提供公司的其他服务。另一对手是拥有多家银行支持的创业企业Symphony，其产品专门针对金融服务等受高度监管的行业而设，这些行业要求更多的合规控制。微软、甲骨文和Facebook等科技巨头也有协同工作应用，但都成绩有限。
Slack’s greatest challenge may be people’s own habits. To some, its endless stream of chatter may be worse even than e-mail, because the barriers to commenting rapidly are lower. The introverted Mr. Butterfield should welcome the chance to appeal to people who do not want constant interaction, even when it comes in textual form.
Slack面临的最大挑战可能是人们自身的习惯。一些人认为，这种没完没了地唠叨也许比电子邮件还要糟糕，因为不假思索地大发议论的屏障降低了。内向的巴特菲尔德也该考虑怎样吸引那些不喜欢持续互动的人，即便是以文本形式互动。
Semiconductors: Chips on Their Shoulders
半导体：芯片之重
China wants to become a superpower in semiconductors, and plans to spend colossal sums to achieve this
中国计划投入巨资打造半导体超级大国,考生如果怕自己错过考试成绩查询的话，可以 免费预约短信提醒，届时会以短信的方式提醒大家报名和考试时间。
The Chinese government has been trying, on and off, since the 1970s to build an indigenous semiconductor industry. But its ambitions have never been as high, nor its budgets so big, as they are now. In an earlier big push, in the second half of the 1990s, the government spent less than $1 billion, reckons Morgan Stanley, an American bank. This time, under a grand plan announced in 2014, the government will muster $100 billion-$150 billion in public and private funds.
自上世纪70年代起，中国政府就一再努力尝试打造本土半导体产业，然而目前其野心之大、预算之高前所未见。据美国银行摩根士丹利估计，上世纪90年代的后半段，中国政府大力推动半导体产业时，投入的资金不到10亿美元。而这一次，根据2014年公布的宏大规划，政府将从公共和私募基金筹集1000至1500亿美元。
The aim is to catch up technologically with the world’s leading firms by 2030, in the design, fabrication and packaging of chips of all types, so as to cease being dependent on foreign supplies. In 2015 the government added a further target: within ten years it wants to be producing 70% of the chips consumed by Chinese industry.
其目标是在2030年前在技术上赶上世界领先企业，在各类芯片的设计、制造及封装上达到先进水平，从而不再依赖外国供应。2015年，政府又新增目标：十年内能生产中国产业所消耗芯片的70%。
It has a long way to go. Last year China’s manufacturers, both domestic and foreign-owned, consumed $145 billion-worth of microchips of all kinds (see chart). But the output of China’s domestic chip industry was only one-tenth of that value. And in some types of high-value semiconductor – the processor chips that are the brains of computers, and the rugged and durable chips that are embedded in cars – virtually all of China’s consumption is imported.
这还有很长的路要走。去年，中国本土及外资制造商共消耗了价值1450亿美元的各类微芯片。但国内芯片业的产值仅为这一数字的十分之一。而对于某些高价值半导体(计算机核心部件处理器芯片以及坚固耐用的嵌入式车用芯片)，中国消费的几乎全是进口产品。
To help them achieve their dream, the authorities realise that they must buy as much foreign expertise as they can lay their hands on. In recent months, state-owned firms and various arms of government have been rushing to buy, invest in or do deals with overseas microchip firms. On January 17th the south-western province of Guizhou announced a joint venture with Qualcomm, an American chip designer, to invest around $280m in setting up a new maker of specialist chips for servers. The province’s investment fund will own 55% of the business. Two days earlier, shareholders in Powertech Technology, a Taiwanese firm that packages and tests chips, agreed to let Tsinghua Unigroup, a state-controlled firm from the mainland, buy a 25% stake for $600m.
为实现梦想，当局意识到必须尽可能地从国外购入他们能拿来利用的专业技术。近几个月来，国有企业及各类政府机构纷纷收购、投资海外微芯片公司或与其交易。1月17日，中国西南省份贵州宣布与美国芯片设计公司高通(Qualcomm)合资2.8亿美元，设立一家生产服务器专用芯片的新公司。该省的投资基金将持有合资公司55%的股份。此前两天，台湾芯片封装及测试企业力成科技公司的股东与紫光集团达成协议，让这家内地国有控股公司以六亿美元购入其25%的股份。
Officials argue that developing a home-grown semiconductor industry is a strategic imperative, given the country’s excessive reliance on foreign technology. They can point to the taxpayers’ money that politicians in America, Europe and other parts of Asia have lavished on their domestic semiconductor industries over the years.
官员们认为，由于中国过度依赖外国技术，发展本土半导体产业是战略要务。他们指出，多年来，欧美及亚洲其他地区的政客都在各自的本土半导体行业上大肆挥霍纳税人的钱。
China’s microchip trade gap is, by some estimates, only around half of what the raw figures suggest, since a sizeable proportion of the imported chips that Chinese factories consume go into gadgets, such as Apple’s iPhones and Lenovo’s laptops, that are then exported. Even so, a policy of promoting semiconductors fits with the government’s broader policy of moving from labour-intensive manufacturing to higher-added-value, cleaner industries.
根据一些估测，中国的微芯片贸易逆差仅是原始数据显示的一半左右，因为中国工厂消耗的相当大一部分进口芯片实际上被用于苹果iPhone和联想笔记本电脑这类之后又再度出口的电子设备。即便如此，政府的宏观政策希望实现从劳动密集型制造业向更高附加值、更清洁的产业转型，振兴半导体产业的政策与之吻合。
Morgan Stanley notes that profit margins for successful semiconductor firms are typically 40% or more, whereas the computers, gadgets and other hardware that they go into often have margins of less than 20%. So if Chinese firms designed and made more of the world’s chips, and one day controlled some of the underlying technical standards, as Intel does with personal-computer and server chips, China would enjoy a bigger share of the global electronics industry’s profits.
摩根士丹利指出，成功的半导体公司利润率一般为40%或以上，而使用半导体芯片的计算机、电子设备及其他硬件企业往往只有不到20%的利润率。所以，假如中国公司在全球芯片设计和制造中占据更大份额，并且有朝一日像英特尔在个人电脑和服务器芯片领域那样，控制了其中部分基础技术标准，那么中国在全球电子行业的利润占比将会更大。
In the government’s earlier efforts to boost domestic manufacturing of solar panels and LED lamps, it spread its largesse among a lot of local firms, resulting in excess capacity and slumping prices. This time it seems to be concentrating its firepower on a more limited group of national champions. For instance, SMIC of Shanghai is set to be China’s champion “foundry” (bulk manufacturer of chips designed by others). And HiSilicon of Shenzhen (part of Huawei, a maker of telecoms equipment) will be one of a select few champions in chip design.
政府之前致力推动国内生产商制造太阳能电池板及LED灯具，为此大力资助众多地方企业，结果导致产能过剩，价格暴跌。这次，政府似乎正集中火力资助为数相对有限的全国性龙头企业。比如，上海的中芯国际要成为中国的“代工厂”(批量制造别人设计的芯片)领头羊，而深圳的海思(电信设备制造商华为的下属企业)将成为芯片设计的少数领军企业之一。
Most intriguing of all, Tsinghua Unigroup, a company spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing, has emerged in the past year or so as the chosen champion among champions, a Chinese challenger to the mighty Intel. Zhao Weiguo, the firm’s boss, started out herding goats and pigs in Xinjiang, a remote province in north-western China, to where his parents had been exiled in the 1950s, having been labelled as dissidents. After moving to Beijing to study at the university, Mr. Zhao made a fortune in electronics, property and natural resources, before becoming chairman and second-largest shareholder (after the university itself) at Tsinghua Unigroup.
最有趣的是，大概从去年开始，由清华大学分拆出的企业紫光集团跃升为领军团队中的领头者、一家将和强大的英特尔一争高下的中国企业。公司老板赵伟国幼时在新疆养猪放羊，上世纪50年代其父母被划为异见份子而流放到这一西北偏远省份。后来，赵伟国来到北京，进入清华大学学习，之后在电子、房地产及自然资源行业发家致富，目前是紫光集团的董事长和第二大股东(清华大学是头号股东)。
The company’s emergence from obscurity began in 2013 when it spent $2.6 billion buying two Chinese chip-design firms, Spreadtrum and RDA Microelectronics. In 2014 Intel bought a 20% stake in its putative future rival, for $1.5 billion, as part of a plan for the two to work together on chips for mobile devices, an area in which Intel has lagged behind. In May last year Tsinghua spent $2.3 billion to buy a 51% stake in H3C, a Hong Kong subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard that makes data-networking equipment. And in November it announced a $13 billion share placement to finance the building of a giant memory-chip plant.
该公司在2013年以26亿美元购入两家中国芯片设计公司——展讯和锐迪科微电子，自此开始崭露头角。2014年，英特尔以15亿美元购入这一公认未来对手20%的股权，这是两者合作开发移动设备用芯片计划的一部分，移动芯片是英特尔一直落后的领域。去年5月，紫光集团斥资23亿美元收购惠普旗下制造数据网络设备的香港子公司华三通信51%的股权。11月，紫光公布130亿美元的配股计划，准备融资打造规模宏大的内存芯片工厂。
Shopping for silicon savvy
Other Chinese firms have also been splashing out. Jiangsu Changjiang, a firm that packages chips, paid $1.8 billion in 2014 to gain control of STATS ChipPac, a Singaporean outfit in the same line of business. In 2015 state-controlled JianGuang Asset Management paid a similar sum for a division of NXP of the Netherlands, which makes specialist chips for cell-phone base stations. A group led by China Resources Holdings, another state enterprise, has made a $2.5 billion takeover bid for Fairchild Semiconductor International, an American firm. But the undisputed leader of the “national team” buying up foreign chip know-how is Tsinghua.
其他中国企业也挥金如土。芯片封装公司江苏长江电子科技公司在2014年投资18亿美元取得新加坡同行新科金朋的控股权。2015年，国有控股的建广资产管理公司以类似金额收购了荷兰恩智浦公司旗下的手机基站专用芯片制造部门。另一国有企业华润集团牵头的财团已出价25亿美元，希望收购美国公司飞兆半导体。但在收购国外芯片技术的“国家队”中，紫光是无可争议的领头羊。
“Many people suspect I’m a ‘white glove’ for the government,” Mr. Zhao declared recently, “but we’re really just a very market-oriented company.” That somewhat understates the official backing that it clearly enjoys: without this, it is hard to imagine the company affording the 300 billion yuan ($45 billion) that Mr. Zhao says Tsinghua plans to spend on further deals over the next five years.
“许多人怀疑我是政府的’白手套’，” 赵伟国最近宣称，“但我们真的只是非常市场化的公司。”这么说多少淡化了紫光集团享受的政府支持，而这种支持显而易见，否则难以想象该公司要如何像赵伟国所说的，负担3000亿元(450亿美元)来完成未来五年的进一步收购计划。
Chinese approaches to foreign semiconductor firms – unlike its firms’ acquisitions of foreign consumer brands – have not always met with a warm reception. Tsinghua reportedly made a $23 billion bid last year for Micron, a big American maker of DRAM – the type of memory chips used to store data on desktop computers and servers. But the bid faltered because of political opposition. The firm’s overtures to SK Hynix, a South Korean maker of DRAM and flash-memory chips (as used in USB sticks and smartphones), were rebuffed in November. In December Tsinghua bought a 25% stake in Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), a Taiwanese chip packager and tester. The resulting political backlash prompted Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), a bigger Taiwanese chip packager, to launch a takeover bid for SPIL in December. Tsai Ing-wen, the main opposition candidate in Taiwan’s presidential election, declared China’s investments in the island’s chip firms a “very big threat” – and on polling day, January 16th, she emerged the victor.
和收购国外消费品牌的情况有所不同，中国企业在接触收购海外半导体公司时并非总是受到热情相待。据报道，紫光集团去年出价230亿美元收购美国DRAM(用于台式电脑及服务器数据存储的内存芯片)大型制造商美光，但由于政治反对而失败。紫光对韩国DRAM及闪存芯片(用于U盘及智能手机)制造商SK海力士的收购要约也在11月被拒。12月，紫光购入台湾芯片封装测试企业矽品精密工业25%的股权。随之掀起的政治波促使台湾规模更大的芯片封装厂商日月光半导体制造股份有限公司在12月出价收购矽品精密工业。台湾总统选举中，主要反对党候选人蔡英文宣称内地企业对台湾芯片公司的投资是“巨大的威胁”。她在投票日1月16日胜出当选。
As to whether China will realise its ambitions, or whether it will continue to be dependent on foreign chip technology, Taiwan’s own experience is instructive. From the 1980s, it was highly successful in developing world-class chip foundries, such as TSMC, and in cultivating sparky designers of processor chips such as MediaTek. But in part that was because of good timing: the chip industry was moving towards a model of separating the design and the fabrication of chips, and Taiwan successfully rode that trend. But its more recent attempt to be big in memory chips was a disaster. Mark Li of Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, reckons that despite $50 billion in capital expenditure during the late 1990s and 2000s, mostly financed by the government, Taiwanese firms met with “en masse failure in memory.”
中国会实现其野心还是会继续依赖国外的芯片技术，台湾的经验值得借鉴。从上世纪80年代开始，台湾非常成功地打造了台积电这样世界级的芯片代工厂，也培育出了联发科技这样朝气蓬勃的处理器芯片设计公司。但某种程度上，那是时势造英雄：当时，芯片产业正转向设计与制造分离的模式，台湾恰逢其时。但其最近意欲在内存芯片业务上做大的尝试却一败涂地。研究公司盛博的马克·李认为，尽管在上世纪90年代末到本世纪初，台湾芯片企业投入500亿美元的资本支出(主要来自政府资助)，但“在内存芯片领域遭遇集体失败”。
These firms lost further fortunes chasing market share. From 2001 to 2010, the global memory-chip business made $8 billion in aggregate profits – but subtract the two successful South Korean makers, Samsung and SK Hynix, and everyone else lost nearly $13 billion. Despite their vast outlays, reckons Mr. Li, Taiwanese firms spent too little to reach the technology frontier and were expecting profits too early.
这些公司在追逐市场份额的过程中进一步流失财富。从2001年至2010年，全球内存芯片业总利润为80亿美元，但除去韩国两大成功厂商三星和SK海力士的利润后，其他公司损失近130亿美元。马克·李认为，尽管这些台湾企业支出庞大，但在前沿技术研究上的投资太少，而且过早期望获利。
Douglas Fuller of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou argues that the maturing of the global semiconductor industry in recent years will make it harder still for China to crack. The incumbents in memory chips have become entrenched, especially after recent consolidation; and the chips themselves, with their associated software, are becoming much more complex, making it harder for Chinese firms to master them. ASE’s chief operating officer, Tien Wu, adds that Taiwanese firms were entering the chip market at a time when it was enjoying heady expansion; it will be more difficult for Chinese firms to succeed at a time of slow growth.
杭州浙江大学教授道格拉斯·富勒认为，近年来全球半导体产业日渐成熟，将令中国更难跻身其中。现有内存芯片企业已经稳扎市场，尤其是在近期的一轮整合后。而芯片本身及相关软件变得愈加复杂，令中国公司更难以掌握。日月光集团的首席营运官吴田玉补充道，台湾公司是在芯片产业迅猛扩展的年代进入芯片市场，中国内地企业要在如今增长缓慢之时成功打入会更难。
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