Country heads charge for AI competitive edge

(China Daily/ANN) -- As the latest tech frontier, the fast development of artificial intelligence is poised to play a pivotal role in driving China’s industrial upgrade, experts and business leaders said.

Continuous technological advancements and increased application across a wide range of fields are also expected to give fresh impetus to the country’s high-quality economic growth. Multimodal AI-powered large language models, or LLMs, which can process and generate content across multiple modalities — including text, images, audio and video — will lead further development of the AI industry, and bolster the revolution in industries such as computing power, servers and chips, they added.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies’ investment in state-of-the-art AI technology, which all major economies are scrambling to establish a beachhead in, is experiencing a robust upward trend, with sustained growth projected in the coming years.
To gain a competitive edge in the global AI chatbot race, industry insiders said Chinese enterprises should put more resources into improving computing power and algorithms, accumulate more high-quality training data and ramp up investment in basic scientific research.
AI is forecast to contribute US$19.9 trillion to the global economy through 2030, and drive 3.5 percent of global GDP in 2030, according to a report released by global market research company International Data Corp.
In 2024, AI entered a phase of accelerated development and deployment, defined by widespread integration that has led to a surge in investments aimed at significantly optimising operational costs and timelines, the report said.
By automating routine tasks and unlocking new efficiencies, AI will have profound economic consequences by reshaping industries, creating new markets, and altering the competitive landscape, it noted.
China’s spending on AI will likely hit US$38 billion in 2027, and account for about 9 percent of the global market, with a compound annual growth rate of about 25 percent from 2023 to 2027, the consultancy estimated.
Zhong Zhenshan, vice-president of IDC China, said LLMs have a profound impact on China’s technology sector. They not only spearhead scientific and technological innovation, but also promote industrial transformation and upgrading as well as development of the digital economy, Zhong said.
With the emergence of AI agent technology, the influence of LLMs will be further expanded, especially in the digital transformation of enterprises, improvement of the intelligence level of business processes, and work efficiency, he added.
AI agents are software programmes designed to intelligently interact with their environment to achieve specific goals. They can learn and enhance performance through feedback by utilising advanced algorithms and sensory inputs to execute tasks and engage with their environments.
Major strides
China has made significant strides in developing AI technology. It is now home to more than one-third of the world’s LLMs, according to a white paper released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. The number of LLMs worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36 percent from China, the second-largest after the United States, which accounts for 44 percent of the total, it noted.
LLMs are AI models fed huge amounts of text data and are used in a variety of tasks, ranging from natural-language processing to machine translations. They involve key technologies underpinning US-based AI research firm OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm since late 2022.

(Latest Update December 31, 2024)