2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference: Big Coffee on Intelligence New products are launched

Text / Reporter Liu Xifeng

From July 6th to 8th, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2023) with the theme of "Intelligent Connected World, Generating the Future" was held in Shanghai. Zhang Ying, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, commented on this theme: "'Smart Connected World' indicates that the conference has long adhered to the international concept of innovation, openness and inclusiveness, actively linked the world's top resources, and given full play to the driving role of the conference. 'Generative Future' represents that this conference focuses on the development of general artificial intelligence and grasps the industry boom caused by generative artificial intelligence. ”

AI "big coffee" Qi Zhizhi

At the critical moment when mankind has entered the era of artificial intelligence, issues such as digital governance, digital ethics, and civilization development associated with its rapid development have become hot topics at present. In this regard, WAIC 2023 faces risks and challenges, responds to global concerns, highlights AI dividends, and condenses consensus on collaboration.

According to statistics, the conference has accumulated more than 1,400 guests to attend, the exhibition area exceeds 50,000 square meters, and a total of 133 forums have been held. As of July 8, the number of offline visitors exceeded 177,000, the traffic of the whole network exceeded 1.07 billion, an increase of 68% over the previous session, and the exposure of the whole network reached 6.41 billion, both reaching a record high.

At the same time, the conference connected with 210 upstream and downstream enterprises, reaching an intentional procurement amount of 11 billion yuan. At the closing ceremony, a total of 32 new major artificial intelligence industry projects were signed on-site, covering different fields such as computing power, data, large models, hardware, and software, with a total project investment of 28.8 billion yuan.

Since the first conference in 2018, WAIC has maintained the high-end standard of the world's top event. The world's top AI figures who appear at each conference attract much attention. WAIC 2023 gathers top celebrities in many fields, 5 Turing Award winners, 1 Nobel Prize winner, more than 80 academicians at home and abroad, more than 50 industry leaders at home and abroad, such as Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Huawei, Alibaba, more than 20 presidents of well-known universities and more than 80 heads of unicorn companies.

Elon Musk, a global technology leader and founder and CEO of Tesla, led the opening speech. "The ratio of computers to humans is increasing sharply every year, which means that the gap between computing power between machines and living things is widening further," he said. The number of robots on Earth will exceed the number of people, which will lead to fundamental changes that will have a profound impact on human civilization. ”

Yang Likun, chief AI scientist of the Meta AI Basic Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team, a Turing Award winner and known as the "Three Musketeers of Deep Learning", talked about his innovative ways to meet the challenges of future AI ethics and governance requirements. He believes that open source is the only way to make AI platforms safe, good, and practical.

"The key to the development of artificial intelligence is to go deep and practical, empower industrial upgrading, serve thousands of industries, and serve scientific research." Focusing on this goal, Huawei must build a strong computing power foundation on the one hand; On the other hand, from the general large model to the industry big model, truly let artificial intelligence empower the industry. Ken Hu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said.

Xu Xiaolan, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, introduced that in recent years, the Chinese industry has developed vigorously, the scale of core industries has reached 500 billion yuan, the number of enterprises has exceeded 4,300, and innovative achievements such as smart chips, development frameworks, and general large models have continued to emerge.

"In the next step, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will take the integration of artificial intelligence and the real economy as the main line to cultivate and expand the intelligent industry." Increase the intensity of artificial intelligence technology innovation, accelerate the adaptation of software and hardware, and build a full-stack industrial chain from smart chips to algorithm frameworks to large models. Xu Xiaolan said.

AI achievements unveiled

At this year's opening ceremony, the conference released the results of the 2023 Outstanding Artificial Intelligence Leader Award (SAIL Award), and selected five WAIC highest awards representing transcendence, empowerment, innovation and leadership: COMAC's 3D supercritical wing fluid simulation heavy device "Oriental Wing Wind", HUAWEI CLOUD AI solver (which can solve various decision optimization problems), and Qualcomm's second-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform's artificial intelligence engine. XtalPi's intelligent automated drug discovery platform and machine learning combined with impedance spectroscopy to predict lithium battery aging.

At the exhibition site, enterprises of different sizes upstream and downstream of the artificial intelligence industry chain bloomed and appeared with their own "façade responsibility".

At the Zhangjiang branch venue in Pudong, robots developed by several university teams were playing a soccer game, and the details of the soccer robot's defense, feints and movement made the participants praise its technical expertise in laughter.

At the iFLYTEK booth, the iFLYTEK Spark Cognitive Model attracted many visitors. Everyone gathered in front of the big model and competed to ask it questions, and the big model quickly and accurately gave answers, becoming a "Internet celebrity check-in point" of the conference.

At Cloudminds Robot's booth, Cloud Ginger, a robot acting as a "coffee master", made fragrant and delicious coffee for visitors. Another cloud-based multi-functional delivery robot works with it to deliver food, precise positioning and route planning to ensure that coffee is safely delivered to the audience. On the other side of the booth, a row of Cloud Gingers turned into "dancers" and performed "Thousand Hands Guanyin" for the audience, demonstrating the robot's extraordinary collaborative ability.

"In the future, robots will enter the home, into people's lives, and take on more work." Wang Bin, vice president of Cloudminds Robotics products, said.

At the same time, many companies have also brought the latest products. More than 400 well-known enterprises at home and abroad, such as Google, Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, participated in the exhibition online and offline, with more than 50 outstanding start-ups and more than 30 new products being launched for the first time. For example, Huawei's "Ascend AI 'Big Model Super Factory'" involving the field of large models; Baidu "Wen Xin Yige" involving AI generation functions, Tencent "Multimedia Lab XMusic", Amazon Web Services "Amazon Bedrock"; Proposed "Graphcore C600 IPU processor PCIe card" involving chips or processors, and "Cloud Flame Intelligent Computing Cluster" of Flameland Technology; Ant Group's "Ant Jian AI Safety Detection Platform 2.0" and XtalPi's "AI Drug R&D Automation Solution" involving specific solutions; Xijing Technology, which involves the field of unmanned driving, "intelligent battery swapping, unmanned commercial vehicle, Q-Truck" and so on.

In addition, a number of blockbuster achievements such as "2023 Big Model and AIGC Industry Map", "Operational Guidelines for Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Large Model", "AIGC Risk Assessment Framework (1.0)" and "Self-Regulatory Convention on Generative Artificial Intelligence Ethics (Draft for Comments)" have been released, which have attracted the attention of the industry and led the development of the industry.

"Modu" is built on the way

So far, Shanghai has successfully hosted six consecutive WAICs. Wu Jincheng, Director of the Shanghai Municipal Economic and Information Commission, said: "Facing the future, the conference will continue to optimize the functions of science and technology vane, application display platform, industry accelerator, governance meeting hall and other functions, and link all parties to create a global event in the field of artificial intelligence. Shanghai will give full play to the magnetic field effect of the conference, promote the healthy development of artificial intelligence with greater efforts, do a good job in algorithm innovation, computing power construction, data collection, and strive to create a more influential artificial intelligence highland. ”

It is reported that Shanghai will soon introduce the key points of the big model innovation and development policy, which will focus on building "3 plans + 5 platforms" around the four directions of "innovation ability, innovation elements, innovative application, and innovation environment".

Regarding the three plans to solve the bottleneck of development, Zhang Ying introduced that first, the large model innovation and support plan, focusing on supporting the city's innovation subjects to develop large models with international competitiveness, implementing special awards, and encouraging the formation of data flywheels to accelerate model iteration; The second is the intelligent computing power acceleration plan, strengthening the construction of intelligent computing power of large models, establishing green channels, ensuring energy consumption indicators, implementing AI computing power coupons, and accelerating the construction of an ultra-fast intelligent computing power bearing network; The third is the demonstration application promotion plan, strengthening the in-depth application and benchmarking scene creation of large models in vertical fields such as intelligent manufacturing, education and teaching, science and technology finance, design creativity, and scientific intelligence.

Regarding the five platforms for building basic support, Zhang Ying introduced: First, support the construction of a large model testing and verification and collaborative innovation center, encourage innovation entities to rely on the center to carry out testing and evaluation work, and accelerate model iteration and compliance application; The second is to support the formation of a large model corpus data alliance, encourage multiple subjects to join the alliance, deepen the co-construction and sharing mechanism, and strengthen the resource supply of high-quality corpus data; The third is to build an intelligent computing power scheduling platform, form large-scale intelligent computing power scheduling and supply capabilities, and serve the computing power needs of innovative enterprises; The fourth is to build an evaluation center for software and hardware adaptation to reduce the adaptation cost of smart chips; Fifth, support the construction of large-model open source communities and collaborative platforms, and create an open ecosystem and open source model.

"In the next step, we will join hands with all kinds of talents at home and abroad to fully promote the construction of 'Modu' Shanghai." Zhang Ying said.

In addition, in order to jointly build a better AI ecosystem, the Big Model Corpus Data Alliance, the Big Model Testing and Verification and Collaborative Innovation Center, and the Shanghai China Mobile Digital Transformation Industry Fund were inaugurated at the opening ceremony of the conference, which will help Shanghai build a higher quality AI industry development ecosystem. At the closing ceremony, the "Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund Metaverse Intelligent Terminal Sub-Fund and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Open Source Ecological Industry Cluster" was officially initiated to help accelerate the construction of artificial intelligence "Shanghai Highland".