A staff member introduces a minimally invasive orthopedic surgery robot to visitors at the 2022 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in east China's Shanghai, Sept. 1, 2022.
BEIJING, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- China's artificial intelligence (AI) industry, which is projected to boast core industrial added value of 508 billion yuan by the end of 2022, has grown as a new engine to buttress the industrial upgrading and production improvement in the country.
Alongside the mushrooming AI-enabled innovative application, industrial added value of core AI industry is likely to expand 18 percent year on year in China last year, predicted by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) recently.
-- Accelerating transformation of traditional industries
At the workshop of a new materials manufacturer in east China's Zhejiang Province, a nearly 50-year-old quality assurance (QA) worker named Wang Li'na has never imagined that she can be a data marking engineer after "AI workers" replace human beings in quality control.
In the past, checking nearly 3,000 silk spindles for silk breakage, stains and other quality problems is the daily work for Wang. But now, she only needs to mark the photos of stained silk spindles taken by 20 industrial cameras on the production lines and transferred to her company's data center.
When traditional optical imagery combines with the AI algorithm, profound analysis of the complicated surface of products can be realized, said a technician with Baidu AI Cloud. Currently, the average checking time for each silk spindle can be shortened to 2.5 seconds, much faster than the past, the technician noted.
Similar smart application scenes such as the unmanned ports, smart prospecting at mining zones and smart medicare can be spotted in lots of places in China now.
Along with the increasing economic benefits brought by AI, more industries have quickened their paces to embrace AI and a complete AI industrial system has been in shape in China, enabling the Chinese economy as a dynamic growth engine, said He Baohong, head with the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of CAICT.
-- Stronger innovation capacity in sight
When expanding in size at a fast speed, China's AI industry is seeing continuous improvements in competitiveness in terms of innovation.
From 2012 to September 2022, about 28 percent of the academic papers publicized around the world were from China and China contributed about 60 percent of the AI patents authorized across the globe in the period.
Key breakthroughs have been made for core technologies such as intelligent chips and open source frameworks and innovation capacity of representative products including terminals and robots kept being strengthened, said Ren Aiguang, deputy head with the science and technology department of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) previously.
A large batch of AI-related companies have emerged in the country. Statistics with Qcc.com, a business registration information provider in China, showed that the number of newly-registered AI companies grew year by year in China in the past decade, with the figure for 2022 up 18.55 percent.
On basis of development of technologies including the large scale pre-trained models, AI generated content (AIGC) firms, conversational AI platforms and open source large model bases have attracted broad attention, introduced He Baohong.
By the end of November 2022, two companies from China had ranked among the top 10 of all the 168 AI unicorns around the world by corporate valuation, He highlighted.
All of these are attributable to China's effective industry-guiding polices and relatively complete industrial system and the active actions taken by multiple market entities, all of which helped incubate the present AI industry ecology.
Recent years, China has unveiled a series of policies and documents to support breakthroughs in core AI technologies, application of related products and exploration of new business modes and paths.
In promoting technology innovation and breakthroughs, China has found and cultivated many excellent AI enterprises and by competition, a batch of quality products have been produced together with formation of the R&D-industry-application integrated "fast lane" for boosting development of AI industry, noted Ren.
China has also built national manufacturing innovation centers on intelligent sensors and intelligent connected vehicles to enhance R&D and industrialization of generic technologies, Ren added. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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