When cultivating artificial intelligence (AI) talents, it's vital to let them understand the strategic needs of China's important industries to connect what they have learned with the country's needs, Wu Wenjun, a professor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Beihang University, told CGTN in an interview.

As an emerging technology, AI is an interdisciplinary field involving computers, automatic control, mathematics, psychology, cognitive science, brain neuroscience and many other aspects of knowledge.

At the same time, it plays an important role in enabling multiple industries, such as manufacturing, agriculture, health care and education.

According to Wu, the other important aspect of cultivating high-quality talents is to give them a strong mathematical and physical foundation and show them how to use that knowledge to solve issues in real scenarios.

The professor and his students are now studying the future of urban logistics, a field that explores how multiple intelligent agents – such as unmanned vehicles, drones and other robots – can cooperate and interact with each other to provide convenience or rescue services, which he describes as swarm intelligence.

With the release of ChatGPT-like bots, Wu began researching how to use large language models to better serve the logistics system for smart cities.

He said many people believe ChatGPT is just like the invention of electricity, which saw a new social and technological revolution.

"It's actually helping people enter what we call the era of artificial general intelligence," said Wu.

The tools we developed in the past can do only one or two jobs: recognize faces or generate pictures, but the ChatGPT-like models build upon all sorts of abilities at the same time, such as cognition, reasoning and even programming, he explained.

He said the bot-like large language models could better interact with humans, thus helping people generate various operation instructions and workflows.

Some people are concerned they will lose their jobs to AI-powered machines or that AI will get out of control and destroy the world. According to Wu, "These concerns are not unreasonable."

"So, there is another important aspect for us when developing professionals in AI, which is to ensure that the scientists and engineers we train follow scientific ethics and morals, thus making sure their inventions really benefit mankind," he said.

Videographer: Guo Huakang

Video editor: Liu Binyue

Cover image: Li Wenyi