The Chinese mainland is home to almost 10,000 digitalized workshops and smart factories nationwide, according to a report released by the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies on Thursday. This highlights the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in driving industry digitalization.
Among these, 421 have been cultivated as national-level smart manufacturing demonstration factories, 90 percent of which have applied technologies such as AI and digital twins. The China Internet Development Report 2024, released during the ongoing World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit in Zhejiang Province, underscores these significant advancements.
By the end of 2023, the number of valid AI invention patents in the Chinese mainland reached 378,000, representing a year-on-year growth of over 40 percent—1.4 times the global average growth rate. From 2014 to 2023, the mainland filed over 38,000 generative AI patent applications, ranking first globally. Generative AI applications have entered a phase of rapid growth, with more than 100 large-scale models with over 1 billion parameters active in the mainland as of March 2024.
AI continues to expand its applications across industries, empowering fields such as electronics, healthcare, and transportation. This expansion has led to the development of hundreds of application models, driving digital transformation and upgrading traditional industries.
For instance, Alibaba Group is committed to making its self-developed large models open source. To date, over 100 open-source models are available on Qwen, Alibaba Cloud's proprietary language model, with cumulative downloads exceeding 40 million, said Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, at the summit. As of the end of September, more than 8 million developers are actively engaged in model development and application on Alibaba's AI open model community \"ModelScope.\" Wu emphasized that making these models open source has significantly lowered the barriers for AI development and adoption across various industries, accelerating the implementation of AI in diverse scenarios.
Likewise, the ERNIE Agent developed by Baidu has significantly advanced the capabilities of Baidu's ERNIE foundation model and driven widespread applications across various industries, attracting more than 800,000 developers and 150,000 enterprises, according to Wang Haifeng, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu. \"For example, we collaborated with academician Zhu Youyong from the Chinese Academy of Engineering and his team to develop the 'Farmer Academician Agent' based on the ERNIE foundation model,\" said Wang. He added that it integrates Zhu's research and agricultural knowledge to provide farmers with real-time assistance on issues such as planting techniques and pest control.
Data from the market research firm International Data Corporation indicates that the market size for the Chinese mainland's large-model platforms and related applications reached 1.77 billion yuan (about 243.8 million U.S. dollars) in 2023. The World Internet Development Report 2024, also released at the summit, highlighted a promising outlook for future industries driven by AI, leading to significant investment from the industrial sector in AI research.
In 2023, the industrial sector produced 51 prominent machine learning models, compared to just 15 contributed by the academic sector. Limited access to funding, data, and computational resources in academia has caused a talent shift toward industry, further solidifying its dominance in AI research and development.
Since 2017, the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies has released these reports annually as outcomes of the WIC. Themed \"Embracing a people-centered and AI-for-good digital future—building a community with a shared future in cyberspace,\" the summit kicked off on Wednesday and is scheduled to conclude on Friday.
Reference(s):
Report: AI empowering digital development of global industries
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