Photo taken on July 8, 2021 shows a 3D holographic projection at the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in east China's Shanghai.(Xinhua/Hu Zhixuan)
BEIJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China have recently launched the deployment of the project "Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Science", as a bid to promote the application of AI in frontier sci-tech R&D.
With heated discussions around recent updates in the AI sector in the past week, including Huawei's PanGu large model series and OpenAI's release of ChatGPT plugins that allow connection with third party apps, the capital market has once again witnessed a wave of attention paid to the AI industry, reported Securities Daily.
Industry insiders believe that this shows a signal of accelerating industrial application of AI, which is featured by maturing technologies, broadening application scenarios and increasing market demands, indicating rapid future development of the industry.
-- Industry development on clearer path
Preferential policies for the AI industry have been introduced and improved in recent years to boost its development.
In July 2017, China's State Council issued a plan for AI development, specifying to accelerate in-depth application of AI and foster the growth of the AI industry, which is expected to serve as a new major economic growth engine for the country.
In August 2022, China's Ministry of Science and Technology announced a batch of 10 AI demonstration application scenarios, including smart farms, smart factories and autonomous driving, underlining the significant role of AI to empower economic and social development.
The value of core sectors of China's AI industry reached 508 billion yuan (about 73.76 billion U.S. dollars) in 2022, up 18 percent year on year, according to data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
From a commercial point of view, AI , as a highly capital-intensive industry, its application generally starts from fields with high capital demand, namely medical treatment, financial technology, etc., before expanding to other fields and developing a mature business model, said Wang Peng, a researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.
Some insiders have divided the development path of the AI industry into three stages including a technology research stage, a technology application stage and an industrialization stage, among which China's AI sector is currently undergoing the second stage of technology application. With multiple industries in China making active efforts to explore the application of AI technologies, it is expected that the AI industry will see rapid development through the upcoming stage of industrialization.
From an industrial point of view, technology foundations including big data management and cloud computing capabilities are premises for the realization of AI, according to Chen Li, chief economist of Chuancai Securities.
Studies on large models and large-scale models are at the frontier of AI research in recent years, which points out a more lucid development direction for the industry. It is expected that such technologies can achieve remarkable progress in fields like speech recognition and image recognition in the short term, providing support for the digital transformation in various industries, according to Yu Xiaoming, senior consultant at Jufeng Investment Information.
From the perspective of industrial application, the combination of AI with any industry offers a potential for innovative growth in the market.
"Currently, we see increasing integration of AI with industries such as intelligent manufacturing, intelligent transportation, smart health, smart home and so on," said Yu, noting that it is necessary to strengthen policy support, encourage enterprises to increase R&D investment and technological innovation, promote deep integration among industry, universities and research institutions, and enhance international cooperation and communication, as a bid to further promote the development of the AI industry.
-- Listed firms promoting industrial layout
Listed firms in China have been actively promoting the layout of the AI industrial chain, with the number of A-share listed companies with "AI" as a keyword reaching over 200, according to the corporate information provider Tianyancha.
Beijing Sinnet Technology Co., Ltd. (300383.SZ) on Monday announced that it would work with its subsidiaries and third-party cooperating companies to build the computing networks required for AI application.
By connecting upstream and downstream industries, the goal is to realize deep integration of AI application scenarios with various sectors. It is also pointed out that the company's data center can provide the infrastructure services necessary for such computing networks that AI uses to generate content.
On the same day, Winning Health Technology Group Co., Ltd. (300253.SZ) said that the company has, so far, applied AI technology in products such as AI diagnosis of bone age and the automatic generation system of chest X-ray report. In addition, the company had just released its annual medical AI report in February this year.
According to estimations by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global technology and consulting services firm, in 2022, the global AI market reached 432.8 billion U.S. dollars. Given a 20 percent compound growth rate, the number is expected to exceed 1.8 trillion by the year 2030.
(Edited by Yu Huichen with Xinhua Silk Road, yuhuichen@xinhua.org)
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