In the world of software development, machine learning and artificial intelligence is the hot subject, and might very well continue to be so even in to 2018, since the trend shows no signs of slowing down.

In fact, looking at the five year trend from Google search results on “machine learning” as the search query, we’re just now hitting the peak and whether we’re going to stay here or not probably to some extent depends on the apps currently being developed, and whether they’ll capture our imagination or ease our day-to-day lives enough.

What’s more surprising perhaps, is where this interest originates from. The US only scored #8 in terms of search popularity, with all the top five countries located in Asia. And with China taking the absolute first place, perhaps we need to look at what they’re developing, and where they’re investing their money.

While we’ve seen a surge in machine learning and artificial intelligence in Europe and the United States, with among others both Google and Microsoft opening up large dedicated research departments, China and the rest of Asia is at the very least on level ground, and in some aspects even further ahead with both investments, projects and interest in a few sectors, including finance. And with Asian companies buying up European ones to capture new markets and spread their reach times are looking interesting for the globalization yet to come.

So why, first of all, are the Asian countries leading this tech surge? An obvious reason might have to do with the asian citizens always having been interested in robots and technology on a more natural and basic level than their western counterparts, but is that the only reason?

The fact that in 2016, Asia accounted for ~65% of the entire world’s growth most likely has also played its part in the level of investments we’re seeing now. Cheaper development costs and a larger selection of skilled talents might also have something to do with the numbers we’re seeing above. Let’s explore further.

The Asian search engine called Baidu, which is basically China’s answer to Google, opened up their own center for deep learning back in 2013, so they were well ahead of the curve when doing so.

Other large corporations such as Samsung and others have also been early investors and adopters of this phenomenon, seeing the potential for intelligent electricity. Tencent which is the name of a large diverse company which operates in a number of sectors have also been investing heavily in AI research, as has the online retailer Alibaba which is owned by one of China’s richest individuals.

But it’s not surprising for most of us that these large multi-national companies are interested in AI and ML, what is surprising though, is how deeply rooted this adoption has become in less obvious companies that are not necessarily spanning the entire globe in reach and scope.

One such company, Ant Financial, is the offspring of Alipay, which in turn is an offshoot of Alibaba. Ant Financial is originally a smartphone payment provider, but has invested heavily into mobile ML apps for several different projects seizing the opportunity to become market leaders with this new technology trend.

One of these projects has to do with car insurance, where the company claims they’re working on technology that will allow people who’ve just been in a car crash, to take photos of the car's damages, describe what happened, and let the computer work out who’s to blame and how badly the cars were damaged.

Another of their inventions is the automatic loan AI, which looks at your past credit reports, payments, salaries and other key data to determine automatically and instantly, whether you qualify for that loan or not.

So already we’re seeing completely separate innovation in the West and in Asia, which in the long run will hopefully spark some interesting competition that in the end will result in better user experiences for the consumers.