Editor's note: Belunn Se, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a senior industry observer based in Shenzhen, China. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) is being held from July 6 to 8 in Shanghai under the theme "Intelligent Connectivity, Generating Future." This year's event is focused on new outlets of industrial and technological changes to accelerate the innovation and evolution of new generation of AI, including large model technology and vigorously creating an innovative development ecosystem, as well as computing power demand and consolidating the ecosystem of intelligent computing industry.

The WAIC has been successfully held for five consecutive sessions, attracting over 600,000 offline visitors and 1.5 billion online attendees, and facilitating the signing and deployment of over 200 major industrial projects with a total investment of 70 billion yuan ($9.66 billion).

As the most important evolution step of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) powered by large language model (LLM) and multi-modal can independently generate and create various forms of content such as text, pictures, voice, video, and code, which will profoundly change various industries, such as office, e-commerce, entertainment, education, and media, and improve their operation efficiency exponentially.

In the last round of traditional manufacturing competition, the efficient benefits from allocated labor collaboration in the industrial chain, the broad domestic demand market and talent-labor-pool, the first mover advantage of asset investment return, and the sound transportation and energy infrastructure, all of these various factors contributed to the cumulative scale effects, which is the root cause of the global rise of Chinese-made products.

It means that most of the developed countries cannot compete for costs, and that countries with low labor costs are usually hard to compete in terms of technology integration. Even if they break through with technology, they may face difficulties in competing with China in terms of scale.

But in the next round of technology competition, AI is revolutionizing the way we innovate and create new products and services. It is also disrupting traditional industries and creating new ones from vertical industry chain of chipset and computing power to broad horizontal applications. For example, AI is being used to develop new drugs and medical treatments to improve human life. And it is being used to create autonomous vehicles that will restructure ride-hailing and transportation. 

While AI continues to upgrade, it is likely to have an even greater impact on the way we live and work. It is important to stay up-to-date on the latest AI research and developments so that we can be prepared for the changes that are coming. Take estimates from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology as a hint, which indicates that the added value of China's core AI sectors hit 508 billion yuan ($72.5 billion) in 2022, for a year-on-year increase of 18 percent.

From external environment perspective, U.S. White House National Security Strategy defines China as "the primary strategic competitor" of the United States. Therefore, some Western political forces want to decouple itself from China economically and have launched a series of technological blockade in the high-tech field.

On the other hand, in the terms of technology development, we are experiencing the AI evolution, just like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI wrote on his February Twitter:  "A new version of Moore's law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months.”

China has a significant head start in AI research and development. Also, Chinese tech giants are investing heavily and making significant progress in a number of areas, including autonomous driving technology and AI chipsets. In Generative AI field, China has launched around 79 large models over the past three years, including internet giants Baidu's ERNIE Bot and Alibaba's DAMO Academy. Huawei and Tencent have also developed similar models.

These are just a few examples of how Chinese AI is progressing for giant companies. As AI continues to develop, Chinese tech giants will continue to make significant advances in this area.

In the context of great power competition, AI is becoming increasingly important. China is putting significant investments and resources in AI research and development, and definitely sees this technology as a strategic priority. It is clear that the country who leads in AI disruptive innovation will obtain a significant advantage generating the future.

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