AI sector needs next step
▶ Breakthroughs required to maintain growth: experts
The next round of growth for China’s booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry lies in broader and deeper integration with traditional industries to expand the application scenarios, along with breakthroughs in basic scientific research to solve the “last mile” problems of AI application, analysts said on Monday.
China has seen robust growth in its AI sector in recent years. The number of AI companies in the Chinese mainland ranks second in the world, and investment in the domestic industry accounts for more than three-quarters of the global total.
As of September 2018, the number of AI companies in the Chinese mainland reached 1,122, according to Zhang Xueli, director of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
“In the first half of 2018, global investment in AI reached $43.5 billion, and China’s AI investment reached $31.7 billion,” Zhang said on Sunday at the 2018 China AI Industry Convention, which was held by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI).
Scholars and industry figures attending the convention mainly focused their discussion on the current “sore points” that need to be solved to drive the next round of growth.
China is facing a challenge to make breakthroughs in AI research, as it has nearly caught up with global leaders like the US, Wang Yanfeng, director of the Suzhou Artificial Intelligence Research Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said at a seminar on Saturday.
“Global development in the AI industry has come to the bottleneck of deep learning,” Wang said.
“The current industry growth is based on data-driven AI technology and has realized full development in many application directions. We need to seek approaches for the next round of growth,” he said.
Blind investment
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on November 14 named 17 key areas as priorities for AI development and called on Chinese tech companies and research institutions to participate in the development of next-generation AI technologies to break the bottleneck.
Li Deyi, director of the CAAI, said at the same seminar on Saturday that it’s important for the country to keep up the industrial output growth to achieve the goal of closing the AI tech gap with the US by 2030.
Meanwhile, investors are pouring money into start-up AI firms. Investment in the sector surged to nearly $2 billion this year via 75 deals, more than four times the total value in the previous two years, Reuters reported, citing Refinitiv data.
However, many experts are becoming concerned about over-heating in the AI industry, and have warned about potential dangers of blind investment.
Yu Youcheng, deputy director of the CAAI, told the Global Times on Monday that some investors lack understanding of the industry development conditions.
“Our AI industry needs calm analysis now. Many follow-up investments without specialized observation are actually not helping the situation,” Yu noted.
“The technology has grabbed the attention of all businesses from healthcare to financial services, but in terms of expanding the application scenarios like self-driving cars, the ‘last mile’ problems are still waiting for major technology breakthroughs in basic scientific research and product design,” Yu added.
“In terms of expanding the application scenarios like selfdriving cars, the ‘last mile’ problems are still waiting for major technology breakthroughs.” Yu Youcheng
Deputy director of the CAAI