China ranks first in the world in the number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) patents. China’s AI industry development has made significant progress, with the technological innovation capabilities in some areas ranking among the top in the world. More than 10 AI chips, as well as innovative products brought by more than 300 major AI companies, will be shown at the conference.
According to a report on China’s AI development released by three institutions including the Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence, nearly 390,000 AI patent applications were filed in China over the past 10 years, accounting for 74.7% of the world total. The core industry size is continuously growing and the integration of AI and the real economy has further deepened.
According to a report on the AI ecosystem in China, along with the gradual maturation of AI technology observed in recent years, many industry giants in China progressively increased their investment in this new market. The burgeoning applications of AI technology have also expanded the scope of this technology from niche research fields to broader commercial areas. Besides being among the leading nations—in terms of AI research output, China is ideally positioned for the rapid development of AI technology.
Delving into the AI market in China, the technology already covers a wide range of segments. Some of the most dynamic areas include the basic layer—the basic parts and algorithms of AI products; the technology layer—technologies that support AI products—and applications, which are the AI products in the different industries.
China’s artificial intelligence industry is becoming one of the most important in the world. However, the market of AI in China is not mature yet and there is still a large space for development. The AI-related companies in China mainly belong to the security, speech interaction and healthcare industries. These areas have strong market demand and mature technology applications. A large portion of China’s AI market share is from speech, computer vision and natural language processing technologies.
The rapid development of AI in China is due to the ubiquity of the mobile Internet and big data as well as computing power. China has a massive base of smartphone users. Mobile internet users create large amounts of data, which is the fuel that AI technology consumes to develop. By using apps on smartphones, individual users can easily control products, such as smart speakers and clearing robots.
The fast-growing big data and cloud computing effectively improve machine learning and cognitive ability. In recent years, especially in specific application fields, there has been a great development in machine learning usage, which is a precondition for the creation of new AI technology.
China has been inventing AI in various fields, including AI language models. As reported by OpenGov Asia The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) unveiled a record-breaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) modelling system called Wu Dao 2.0. This AI model breaks the world record as a super-large-scale pretraining model with 1.75 trillion parameters and appears to be among the world’s most sophisticated AI language models.
The AI model aims to enable machines to think like humans and achieve cognitive abilities beyond the Turing test which is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. When a computer convinces a sufficient number of humans into believing that it is not a machine but rather a human, the computer intelligence passes the Turing test.
The AI achieved excellent results in nine benchmark tasks in the pre-trained model field and was close to breaking the Turing test in simulating conversational speech, writing poems, understanding images and text summaries, answering questions, as well as painting.
The language models are an informal indicator of countries’ advancement in AI research which is a key aspect of tech competition amongst many countries. Whoever develops the most potent language model will be best positioned to corner future markets and spread influence. AI models also reflect the data and biases of their programmers which means that English and Chinese language models are set to dominate.