Tech companies from all over the world showed up at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this week, with China leading the pack with over 1,500 artificial intelligence-related robots, products and models.
The conference started Thursday and ends Saturday will also feature such companies as Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT). The theme for the conference is “Governing AI for Good and for All” and be focused on China’s development efforts regarding AI despite U.S. sanctions on chips and chipmaking tools.
Chinese AI and facial recognition company, SenseTime, revealed its Sensenova 5.5 large language model (LLM), saying that it serves as an adequate rival for OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
“Nobody will deny that we are facing limited computing power in China,” said Zhang Ping’an, head of cloud computing unit at Huawei, which is under U.S. sanctions. “If we believe that not having the most advanced AI chips means we will be unable to lead in AI, then we need to abandon this viewpoint.”
The U.S. Department of Commerce put Huawei on its trade blacklist in 2019. Despite this, the company has managed to obtain advanced chipmaking tools from U.S. companies through a special license. However, Huawei is struggling to ramp up production of its Ascend 910B artificial intelligence chip, China’s top alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips, which U.S. trade restrictions prohibit from being sold to Chinese customers.
Meanwhile, Tesla displayed its humanoid robot Optimus behind glass at the conference on Thursday. The second-generation humanoid robot, still not in full-scale production, can perform tasks that are unsafe, repetitive, or boring, according to the company.
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China reveals general-purpose robot designed with AI software
Optimus, however, may have some competition.
The National Local Joint Human Robot Innovation Center also revealed its general-purpose robot Qinglong. This initiative aims to accelerate innovation, collaboration, and development within the global robotics and AI communities, potentially driving advancements across a range of industries.
The company designed Qinglong for developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) software and hardware. VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQB: VRSSF), a Vancouver-based AI tech firm, calls AGI the next stage of development. It includes systems that show the flexible, general-purpose intelligence found in humans.
The robot is 1.85 meters tall and weighs 80kg. The robot is open-source and researchers can access its hardware structure, parameters and soon its embodied intelligence software package. The goal is to release a new robot every year named after one of the Chinese zodiac animals.
The conference also inadvertently put the limitations of the technology on display.
Visitors experienced a few unexpected occurrences, including falling robots, lost entry scan codes, and AI models that underperformed.
Additionally, the facial recognition entry gates posed problems for children and attendees purchasing tickets on-site, as their facial information wasn’t registered.
The conference displayed artificial intelligence models for education, finance retail, and other industries in the exhibition halls.
However, a mother testing an AI-powered learning machine expressed frustration as the system provided irrelevant results, making her repeat “I don’t understand” multiple times. Industry experts attributed these issues to the on-site internet environment and surrounding noise.
These incidents compounded experts’ concerns about generative AI applications, including biases, data security, control of autonomous devices, and the evolving social and technical landscape, and also how balancing innovation with ethical considerations needs to remain a key focus.
Verses AI is a sponsor of Mugglehead news coverage
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