WAIC 2019 in China

World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 (WAIC 2019) in Shanghai just closed at the end of August. With the last day when it opened to the masses of visitors, it probably marked a critical point of the development of China AI industry. The whole country is showing enormous enthusiasm and energy for the new revolution, from the government to the mass, from manufacturers to internet companies. Under the background of China-US trade war, the economic conflict is spreading rapidly to other fields, especially the technology competition. At WAIC 2019, it’s widely received that AI technology is growing as the most important part of the future of human society. Tracing back to the last three industrial revolutions, the western world has played a vital leading role and decided how human beings live on this planet. However, in recent years China has developed rapidly in the manufacture, internet, and technology and accumulated solid technological infrastructure due to its enormous market and effective government supports.

At WAIC 2019, we noticed that the integration among manufacturers, big data, network & communication has been starting well distributed to promote more deep cooperation in the field of AI. Not just the domestics, the globalized participation was also a significant process at WAIC 2019. For example, the international giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla brought their self-developed AI solutions to the exhibition primarily because of the enormous China market. And China AI companies are also proactive to establish cooperation and joint laboratories with oversea research institutions.

‘Dual-Ma (Pinyin) Talk’ -Jack Ma&Elon Musk 

At the opening ceremony of the WAIC 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba founder Jack Ma had a most-watched talk on AI development. During the talk, they showed completely different views on AI development.

‘The biggest mistake that AI researchers are making is assuming they are intelligent. They are not. AI is vastly smarter.’

-Elon Musk

Elon Musk more mentioned that researchers are underestimating how powerful AI is. He seems to concern more about whether human society can take the boomerang effect of AI.

AI is going to open a new chapter of the society of the world that people try to understand ourselves better, rather than the outside world.

99.99% of the prediction that human beings had in history about the future is all wrong. Only 0.001% of the predictions are right. They are right because by accident.

-Jack Ma

Jack Ma, oppositely, showed more of his confidence in AI as an entrepreneur. As being through the rapid development of China internet, Jack Ma presented an optimistic attitude as most China AI companies have.

Their discussion presented two voices which are commonly heard from both the academics and industry. Their companies are important powers to AI development. Especially for Tesla, their Autopilot has been applied in thousands of Tesla cars as an assistant self-driving system. While for Alibaba, their advantage of consumer-market data helps them build up a mature financial AI service system, Ant Financial. At least from their current focus, Tesla is an industrial manufacturer integrating the AI software and car hardware together for general users, while Alibaba is a successful internet service provider who tries to integrate AI technology to serve more business participators. For their business, they do have something in common. For example, they both are paying much attention to the China market, the biggest single market in the world covering over 1/5 population of the planet. The fast proceedings of Tesla Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai have deepened the cooperation between Tesla and China, which is also the reason why Musk hailed China as ‘the future’.

AI applications in 2019

At WAIC 2019, most AI companies brought their AI solutions or products to the exhibition, such as Huawei’s AI chips, Tesla’s Model 3, Deepblue’s AI bus and AI Retail, ABB’s AI manufacture robots and so on. It’s pretty predictable from the various application that AI will enter all aspects of our life very soon but not just existing as a kind of algorithm in our phones. Though AI is still in a very early stage, the AI providers now are more thinking a wider application. It’s also why both Jack Ma and Elon Musk agreed the rapid and powerful development of AI.

Another hot topic of WAIC 2019 is the breakthrough of 5G communication technology. Equipped with 5G-enabled real-time remote, AI companies were bringing more human-life applications with faster data transmission and multiple interaction modes. For example, the 5G AI road cleaner developed by Deepblue has been able to help urban administrators monitor public services such as real-time traffic, and then reach prompt reaction with AI. Now it has been developing as an important part of the concept of AI CITY.

AI dilemma 

Another thing worth noticing is that there is a controversy when a company showed their AI monitoring and analysis of student classes. They integrated their AI with the class monitor cameras and analyzed their behaviors. It was claimed that their AI would help educators improve their teaching quality. But on the China internet, they were challenged that it was an invasion of students’ privacy. Recently the company responded that it’s just a concept display of one of the AI applications and they will stick to the principle of data privacy protection. The controversy reveals a common dilemma-how AI researchers and providers guarantee the legitimacy in their applicational process.

As various applications of AI have been brought into reality, how to distinguish their legitimacy is also becoming an important topic of AI development.

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