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Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time, and a new generation of artificial intelligence has been proposed for many years, but this field has really "broken into" into the public eye, and I have to mention the "whirlwind" blown by ChatGPT.
Recently, Sora made a stunning appearance with "small team, big work", and practitioners in related fields in China inevitably asked why such innovation did not happen in China, and when will China have its own blockbuster innovation achievements?
At this time, people have turned their attention to Shanghai.
How critical are computing resources in the battle for large models?
The domestic AI model ushered in the moment of benchmarking the world's top version!
In the last week of April, SenseTime released the latest generation of artificial intelligence model "Ririxin 5.0", which has stronger knowledge, mathematics, reasoning and code capabilities, and its comprehensive performance is fully benchmarked against GPT-4 Turbo, and it has reached or surpassed GPT-4 Turbo in mainstream objective evaluations.
Interestingly, they chose the address of the new product launch in the intelligent computing center in Pudong.
At present, artificial intelligence can not only assist scientific research and artistic creation, but also realize autonomous driving, becoming the key to unlocking new quality productivity.
In the industrial field, "AI + Industrial Internet" helps enterprises carry out intelligent manufacturing, digital procurement and marketing, and in the medical field, lower limb exoskeleton robots can assist paralyzed people in rehabilitation......
Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, told reporters that "artificial intelligence +" will reshape the inherent cognition and inherent processes of the industry.
Because of this, all countries have taken AI as a priority industry and have seized the commanding heights of AI competition.
At present, there is a global debate about what new scenarios can be expanded by AI large models, but computing power is the energy of the AI era, and it has long become a consensus that it will be ready to use like water and electricity in the future.
Whether it is training a large model from scratch, or with the blessing of a large model, the chatbot relies on "reasoning" to answer all kinds of fancy questions from millions of users per second, and it is inseparable from the support of computing power, especially intelligent computing power.
However, the gap between China and the world's top level is quietly widening.
On the one hand, last year, the most advanced Nvidia chips in the industry were banned one after another, and on the other hand, the substitution of domestic AI chips has been slow to open the situation.
How to maintain the rapid development of domestic large models is not a small test.
Shanghai is the city with the best ecology of the large model industry in China, gathering the largest number of intelligent chip innovation enterprises, nearly 100 basic large models and industry vertical large models have been released one after another, and large-scale intelligent computing clusters, large model testing and verification centers and more than 40 investment and financing institutions fully support and serve large model training, evaluation and investment and financing.
How will Shanghai, the "model capital", build computing power? After winning the battle for computing power, will the domestic AI model really be "flat"?
Chen Ming, head of the infrastructure of UCD Qingpu Data Center, told reporters that since the explosion of Sora, it has brought about an "arms race" of computing power, and companies are looking forward to achieving "miracles" by increasing model parameters and data volumes.
Last year, the industry aimed to build computing power clusters with 10,000 graphics cards, and today 50,000 graphics cards have begun to become the norm. Indeed, to some extent, computing power determines market competitiveness. However, with the increase of a large amount of computing power, new problems have arisen.
Chen Ming told reporters that the computing power of AIGC (Intelligent Computing Center) is basically a single horse, and the electricity consumption is about 2,400 kWh throughout the day, and the annual electricity consumption is more than 100 million kWh. 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 400,000 households in China for a month.
However, even though AI is a "maniac eater", the pace of investment in computing power has not stopped. Statistics show that every 1 yuan invested in computing power may drive 3 to 4 yuan of GDP growth. To this end, the Yangtze River Delta is laying out supercomputing centers one after another.
Chen Junyan, deputy chief engineer of the East China Branch of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, believes that all localities must deploy computing power, "it is inevitable that there will be repeated construction, resulting in waste", and a hub platform for computing power scheduling needs to be established urgently.
According to the data, at present, the overall computing power utilization rate of the mainland is only less than 30%. There is an imbalance and mismatch between the supply structure and user demand, and there is a mismatch between supply and demand, resulting in a large amount of idle computing power.
How to turn "paper computing power" into "usable computing power" Shanghai tries to "solve the problem"
As early as May 2021, the "Eastern Data and Western Computing" project was put on the agenda, and Shanghai was one of the earliest cities to deploy it, with an average latency of 12.84 milliseconds between the city's data centers and enterprises and the country's eight major computing power hubs, leading the country.
Zhang Hongtao, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, said that according to the different needs of large model enterprises, training, inference and business deployment, the government encourages and supports the use of the resources of the national computing network to achieve such a high allocation of resources.
At the same time, the government is also actively promoting the combination of green energy and computing power centers to achieve the requirements of green development of new quality productivity.
However, due to network latency and other limitations, not all computing service scenarios are applicable to "Eastern Data and Western Computing", such as low-latency business scenarios such as autonomous driving and securities trading, which must be computed nearby.
When there are still technical bottlenecks in the national computing power collaboration, how can Shanghai, which is "every inch of land and every inch of gold", test the quality of the "model capital".
In 2022, Shanghai issued the first provincial-level local regulation in the field of artificial intelligence, the Regulations of Shanghai Municipality on Promoting the Development of the Artificial Intelligence Industry, officially proposing to build Shanghai into an artificial intelligence highland with international influence.
It not only contributed to the "Shanghai Plan" for the mainland's artificial intelligence governance, but also paved the way for Shanghai to catch the wave of large models.
At present, the scale of Shanghai's artificial intelligence industry has increased from 134 billion yuan in 2018 to more than 380 billion yuan in 2022, with an average annual growth rate of more than 29%, and the number of enterprises above designated size has also increased from 183 in 2018 to 348 in 2022.
At the same time, Shanghai will continue to accelerate the construction of high-performance computing infrastructure this year, which will be used to connect more than 70% of the city's major computing resources, and upgrade and expand the high-performance inclusive computing power supply capacity of the Shanghai Supercomputing Center.
Zhang Hongtao told reporters that Shanghai plans to build a "computing power supermarket", which will start from the problem-oriented and demand-oriented, give certain support through public finance, and give full play to the leverage role of financial funds.
To build a "model capital" Shanghai has been working hard
Artificial intelligence is one of the three leading industries in Shanghai, located in the mode speed space of Xuhui Binjiang, Shanghai, is the first in the country and the only large-scale model innovation ecological community in Shanghai, and has brought together 58 artificial intelligence start-ups, of which 86% are vertical applications, involving many different fields.
This year, Shanghai occupies 24 of the first four batches of large models that have passed the online filing. Of the 24 large-scale models for the record in Shanghai, Xuhui District occupies 15 of them, which are concentrated in the mold speed space.
The person in charge of the park told reporters that half of the settled enterprises have returnee backgrounds, and these enterprises can not only enjoy rent reductions and exemptions, but also obtain the necessary resources for the research and development of large models such as computing power, data, evaluation, and finance.
Their computing power scheduling platform has connected with 9 suppliers including SenseTime, Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, and the three major telecom operators, with more than 50,000 GPU cards, to ensure that the computing power of large-scale model enterprises is available, sufficient, and easy to use.
Zhixiang Future, a technology company engaged in the development of Wensheng video models, is one of them. They will release their "Zhixiang Vision Model" in early May, aiming directly at Sora.
Why choose Shanghai, the person in charge of the company told reporters that there is a large computing power support and many application scenarios, and "the upper and lower floors are the upstream and downstream".
If it is now the "outlet" of large models, for start-up large model enterprises, attracting investment and cooperation from large companies is an important opportunity for development and growth.
1 km away from the straight-line distance of the mold speed space, the West Bank Digital Intelligence Center has started.
After completion, the West Bund Digital Intelligence Center, with a volume of more than 1 million square meters, will become the extension bearing place of the mold speed space, meeting the needs of large-scale model enterprises in the incubation, acceleration, expansion, establishment of headquarters and other industrial space continuity.
"Al+" is the core of this wave of large models, which are expected to empower thousands of industries and become a new engine for the development of the real economy. Shanghai has seized the opportunity and is in the forefront.
Take a look at the journalist: Wang Cheng
Editor: Wang Cheng
Cinematographer: Zhang Qi, Xu Jin
Editor-in-charge: Zhao Xin