Beijing recently launched a draft of a policy to spur development of artificial intelligence and its general intelligence branch. This policy will make sure to support AI firms by boosting the use of cloud providers and data companies.
The three main areas of strategy involve computing power, training data, and applications. The plan calls for closer collaboration between cloud providers and universities and companies who use the large amount of computing power to power AI, language models, and other projects. Beijing will also launch a state-backed, centralized platform to allocate these resources to users.
The second strategy seeks to “clean” Chinese-language data and meet the new privacy law. This process of anonymization will be labor-intensive, and the Beijing big data exchange launched recently will help with this.
The third strategy seeks to find applications for AI in medicine, finance, transportation, and urban management.
One company mentioned in this article is Alibaba, which accounted for a third of cloud infrastructure services spending last year. Behind them are Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu. However, the US is starting to restrict the export of powerful AI chips to China, causing companies like Nvidia to come up with lesser powerful processor alternatives for domestic use, like with Huawei and Biren.
The person mentioned in this article is OpenAI. This organization relies heavily on Kenyan workers to manually label and scrub toxic data from training sets.
The article concludes by mentioning the necessity of infrastructure for AI training as well as the escalating US-China competition in this field. Beijing’s policy marks an important step in developing the ground for AI development and innovation.
