China is at the forefront of global digital transformation, with almost 10,000 digitalized workshops and smart factories nationwide. This significant development was highlighted in a recent report released by the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies on Thursday, underscoring the pivotal role of artificial intelligence (AI) in driving industrial digitalization.
The “China Internet Development Report 2024,” unveiled during the 2024 World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit in east China’s Zhejiang Province, revealed that among these advanced manufacturing facilities, 421 have been recognized as national-level smart manufacturing demonstration factories. Remarkably, 90 percent of these factories have integrated cutting-edge technologies such as AI and digital twins.
The report delves into China’s strides in information infrastructure, digital economy growth, cybersecurity, and the governance of cyberspace, painting a picture of a nation rapidly embracing digital innovation.
By the end of 2023, China had secured 378,000 valid AI invention patents, marking a year-on-year growth of over 40 percent—1.4 times the global average growth rate. From 2014 to 2023, China filed over 38,000 generative AI patent applications, ranking first globally. Generative AI applications have entered a rapid growth phase, with more than 100 large-scale models exceeding 1 billion parameters in China as of March 2024.
AI’s influence extends across various industries, with sector-specific large models empowering fields such as electronics, healthcare, and transportation. This expansion has led to the development of hundreds of application models, driving digital transformation and modernizing traditional industries.
Alibaba Group, for instance, is committed to making its self-developed large models open source. According to CEO Wu Yongming, over 100 open-source models are now available on Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary language model, with cumulative downloads exceeding 40 million. “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.’ 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,” said Wu.
Similarly, Baidu’s ERNIE Agent has significantly advanced the capabilities of Baidu’s ERNIE foundation model, attracting over 800,000 developers and 150,000 enterprises. Wang Haifeng, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu, shared an 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. It integrates Zhu’s research and agricultural knowledge to provide farmers with real-time assistance on issues such as planting techniques and pest control.”
According to data from market research firm International Data Corporation, the market size for China’s large-model platforms and related applications reached 1.77 billion yuan (about 243.8 million U.S. dollars) in 2023. The promising outlook for future industries driven by AI has led 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 “China Internet Development Report” and the “World Internet Development Report” have been released for eight consecutive years as outcomes of the WIC. This year’s summit, themed “Embracing a people-centered and AI-for-good digital future—building a community with a shared future in cyberspace,” kicked off on Wednesday in Wuzhen and is scheduled to conclude on Friday.
Reference(s):
Report: AI empowering digital development of global industries
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