Beijing asks cloud providers to support AI companies

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As the great language models of Western tech companies show the potential to disrupt everything from marketing, teachingto codingChina is rushing to cultivate its homegrown AI pioneers by increasing state support.

beijing is now seeking public opinion in a draft policy aimed at developing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a category of AI that can theoretically carry out all human tasks. In short, the goal of the policy is to strengthen AI companies by reinforcing support from cloud providers and data companies.

It is not uncommon to see the capital city spearheading policy making in emerging industries. Beijing, for example, was the first to allow driverless robotaxis shuttles. passengers on open roads under certain restrictions.

The AGI plan lays out action plans around three main areas: computing power, training data, and applications.

The first strategy requires closer collaboration between cloud providers, computing powerhouses, and universities and enterprises, which consume vast amounts of processing power to train large language models, multimodal learning, and other AI. The policy proposes a centralized, state-backed platform that allocates public cloud resources to users on demand.

Alibaba accounted for more than a third of China’s cloud infrastructure services spending last year, ranking first, according to a market research firm. canalys. Huawei, Tencent and Baidu were left behind.

The second strategy acknowledges the lack of quality Chinese-language data and encourages “compliant cleansing” of such data sets, including data anonymization, likely an effort to comply China’s strict new privacy law. No doubt the process will be time and labor intensive as we have seen how OpenAI depends on Kenyan workers to manually label training data and remove harmful text.

from beijing big data exchangeLaunched by the government in 2021 to facilitate data trading in all facets of society, it will help in the process of obtaining data.

Lastly, the policy sets out a list of potential AI pilot applications, ranging from the use of AI in medical diagnosis, drug manufacturing, financial risk control, transportation, and urban management.

The proposed policy also addresses the importance of hardware and software infrastructure for AI training. Amid increasing competition between the US and China, the latter is striving to drive innovation in key technologies like semiconductors.

United States already restricts the export of Nvidia’s powerful H100 AI chip to China. In response, Nvidia devised a less powerful processor for China to circumvent export controls. Domestic companies such as tech giant Huawei and startup Biren are also working on alternatives to Nvidia.