Dominance in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a priority for the Chinese government over traditional western competitors such as the United States. Surprisingly, one of the large companies lining up to benefit from this effort is India’s Disney+ Hotstar, which is rapidly recruiting new AI talent from a Beijing headquarters.
“At present, our team has nearly 50 members, almost all of whom graduated from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and other top universities in China,” a recruitment post in Mandarin distributed to students of Peking University said. The streaming service is offering discounted or free access to Disney’s theme parks and resorts to young talent willing to crunch the enormous amounts of data generated by Hotstar’s millions of viewers, most of whom are in India and Southeast Asia.
In 2017, the Chinese government said that by 2030, the country would strive to become a “global innovation centre” in Artificial Intelligence, with $147.80 billion in revenue targets. China’s university system was quick to respond with a greater emphasis on AI courses, adding more than a half-dozen undergraduate AI courses in 2021, for example.
While China uses AI to fuel its vast surveillance apparatus, its aims also include benefiting private enterprise, which would help it gain an advantage over geopolitical competitors by becoming a destination for enterprises seeking to use big data and machine learning.
And this is where Disney enters the picture.
While Disney+ Hotstar isn’t available in China — having a streaming service there is a privilege granted to international companies only infrequently, if ever — it has showed a genuine interest in capitalising on the country’s ambitious tech goals. Investors from all sectors have come to China, as the country has outperformed expectations in various areas, particularly in technology.
Big data analytics — processing and making sense of large amounts of information — is a key component of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning fields. It’s also an industry that services like Hotstar stand to benefit from immensely. With a catalogue stretching from sports (IPL), original movies and shows, a deep regional film library and much more, data on what makes users spend more time on the platform may be invaluable to the company.