Hong Kong AI start-up tracks government policy patterns to predict major regulatory changes
- Bilby says it had predicted China’s 2021 crackdown on the private tuition industry, and last year’s campaign targeting the pharmaceutical sector
- China watchers can expect to see crackdowns on healthcare and the financial sectors and economic stimulus funded by government bonds and credit expansion, it says
Why is a government like a computer program? To a Hong Kong start-up, it’s because its activities can be mapped, converted into structured data, and studied using computers – to the extent that their next move can be predicted.
Bilby, which bills itself as an AI-powered decoder of government policy, uses machine learning to analyse policies of several major economies, predominantly China. By processing voluminous data, it can generate insights about what governments may intend to do – predicting regulatory changes ahead of the event, the company says.
“Governments are always telling everybody what to do, or what they are doing, because they have to communicate at some point with the public. And that is a very rich data source,” said Ryan Manuel, the company’s founder.
“The more that we can read those communications around the world, across different languages, across different cultures, the better off we will be.”
Bilby works by collecting millions of documents’ worth of publicly available data on government policy, ranging from official announcements at all levels of government to media coverage and information on over 100,000 listed and private companies.
