Chinese state media is drumming up support for generative
artificial intelligence (AI) development in the country, extolling its potential to help drive economic growth and become a useful daily tool, while maintaining caution about its risks and asserting
regulation of the
technology.
An op-ed piece published on Friday by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of
China’s Communist Party, suggested that generative AI is on its way to becoming an essential part of the workplace and people’s everyday life, which would lead to profound changes in
society, stimulate
economic growth and drive a new industrial revolution.
Generative AI refers to the algorithms, such as those that power
ChatGPT and similar services, that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Recent breakthroughs in this field have the potential to drastically change the way people approach content creation.
“Our country has established systematic [AI] research and development capabilities covering areas from theories to software and hardware technologies,” the People’s Daily op-ed piece said.
Citing a report published at
annual tech event the Zhongguancun Forum held in Beijing last month, the People’s Daily piece said Chinese institutions have so far launched at least 79 large language models (LLMs) with more than 1 billion parameters, a measure of the size and complexity of a model.
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict, and generate content using very large data sets. These represent the technology used to train AI chatbots like
Microsoft-backed
OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“The reason some of the international large [language] models are more advanced lies in their access to massively large and high-quality training data sets,” the People’s Daily piece said. It indicated that the country remains behind in terms of AI-related basic theories and quality training data for LLM applications.
To solve that challenge, the country should pool its resources to enable breakthroughs in generative AI and pursue innovation in terms of theoretical research and applications of the technology, according to the article. It suggested the sharing of quality Chinese training data through coordinated efforts.
Massive training data, advanced algorithms and high-performance computing resources are some of the most critical factors behind the rise of generative AI services like ChatGPT, which was launched last November and ignited
a global AI arms race.
In the past few months, major Chinese cities from
Beijing and
Shenzhen to
Shanghai have each unveiled strategic policies to promote AI development.
Those initiatives show the urgency in China to accelerate development in that field amid
US trade sanctions, which have blocked mainland firms’ access to most advanced
semiconductors and chip-manufacturing equipment.
The People’s Daily article, however, still cautioned about potential risks associated with generative AI.
“The governance challenge brought up by large AI models should not be ignored,” the editorial said, adding that China should “construct a comprehensive set of laws, rules and ethics to ensure the healthy development of AI”.
In April, a statement issued by state media outlet Xinhua, which summarised the quarterly meeting of the Communist Party’s Politburo on China’s social and economic development, said the country must “create an ecosystem for [generative AI] innovation, but at the same time take risk prevention into account”.
The 2023 legislation plan of the State Council, China’s cabinet, includes the submission of a draft AI law, among more than 50 measures up for review by the
National People’s Congress Standing Committee, according to a document published on the council’s website earlier this month.
