After experiencing a boom in 2021, investment in China's artificial intelligence (AI) field has cooled down this year. According to ITjuzi, a business information service provider, AI industry is estimated to have received a total of 77.04 billion yuan ($11 billion) in financing as of November 10, 2022, a 61% decrease compared to the same period last year.
Instead of walking away from the cutting-edge technology, investors and entrepreneurs started to focus more on the actual value proposition of AI.
With the grand opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, an accelerated exploration into solid application scenarios for AI got underway.
When gold medal winner and teen star Eileen Gu’s AI doppelganger “Meet Gu” popped up in Migu video, an app belonging to China Mobile, she was not alone — other Olympics-related virtual influencers such as Dong Dong by Alibaba’s Alibaba DAMO Academy, Luo Tianyi, a pop culture idol who sang at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics Cultural Festival.
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Motion capture, natural language processing, image enhancement, and others were the backbone technologies behind the AI solutions, and the now fierce AIGC field was already envisioned by people in the industry since the beginning of the year.
With advanced AI which will bring better picture quality and better image reconstruction to VR content, eventually, it would be possible to see UGC flourish alongside professional content to eventually achieve AIGC (AI-Generated Content), according to Cai Shuhuan, the COO of Kandao Technology — one of the equipment suppliers for the Beijing Olympic Games.
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AI technology was not only applied to sports events and athletes, but also to the less lucrative but equally attention-deserving groups — people with disabilities. Taobao, China’s biggest online shopping platform, launched AI sign language interpreters in its live stream rooms this year.
Via split-screen view, people who are hard of hearing can finally understand product introductions and promotional events.
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The storm of AI has even swept the art scene in China. AI curators, such as Baidu’s Wen YaoYao, who can host live streams and talk to visitors in multiple museums simultaneously, are more and more prevalent in museums.
With the development of AI technology and the emergence of digital human production platforms in China, there is huge potential for service virtual humans like Wen Yaoyao. The production period of 2D digital humans has shortened to minutes from weeks, and that of 3D hyper-realistic digital humans has shortened to 1–2 weeks from 2–3 months, according to Baidu.
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In addition to chatbots and AI manga TikTok filters, AIGC in China has been gaining industry attention. In August this year, Kuaishou, China’s leading short video platform, launched its new brand StreamLake, which offers Video+AI solutions for enterprises.
StreamLake can search for video footage based on plain texts that users upload, and generate a complete video. Furthermore, with StreamLake, short videos can be accurately interpreted with or without hashtags. A 64-dimensioned video interpretation would be automatically generated, according to Kuaishou.
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While users are getting used to innovative AI solutions for images or texts, AIGC applications for music have been picked up by Chinese tech companies such as NetEase, Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent.
AIGC’s startups and commercial rollout plans will continue to increase in the next 2–3 years, and the market size will potentially exceed 1 trillion yuan by 2030.
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Of course, we can’t forget about one of the most exciting uses of AI technology — autonomous driving. The sector experienced a tough year as tightened monetary policy popped the high-valuation bubble, thus, leading players are speeding up their commercialization plans. Not only did Baidu, one of the autonomous driving pioneers in China, unveiled a concept car of its AI-powered robotic electric vehicle called the ROBO-01, but startups such as Pony.ai and WeRide are also playing catch up.
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Policy-wise, 2022 is seen as a big year for autonomous driving in China. According to a Development Plan issued by China’s state council, “by 2025, L4 vehicles will be commercialized in limited areas and specific scenarios, and by 2035, L4 vehicles will find massive application.” Many groundbreaking policies relating to the field have been issued this year, including a new set of Administrative Rules issued in Beijing for granting road tests and demonstrative application of autonomous shuttles, and a draft issued in November by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology together with the Ministry of Public Security which encourages the introduction of L3-L4 intelligent vehicles. According to the Beijing Business News, the market size of autonomous trucks, which is a hot commercialization concept for autonomous technology, can reach 1 trillion yuan in 2030, and the market would be huge enough to keep several self-driving companies afloat.
AI has been affecting Chinese people’s lives in more ways than meets the eye. As Chinese youth face a more volatile job market than ever before, they find themselves confronting AI interviewers.
Some of the AI interview tools used by Chinese enterprises combine preset algorithms with tailored questions, which are capable of recognizing non-verbal indicators, claim to make fair assessments with high accuracy rates. For example, “AI Yi Mian” by Zhaopin.com, an Indeed-like service, prides itself with 98% accuracy when compared to human HRs.
A person who operates a tutoring service that prepares job seekers for AI interviews, noted that AI interviewers possess a level of adaptability and tenacity that no human can equal, which is advantageous for job seekers. “Imagine you scheduled an interview with a human HR representative for Friday evening. Do you believe you would receive a fair evaluation if the HR representative was exhausted and eager to go home?”
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Ever since 2017, when the State Council issued the Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, China joined a race to achieve technology independence and global dominance. At the forefront of this rise are cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
In China, where the population is vast and access to data is abundant, AI, an industry that heavily relies on the gathering and processing of data, has been developing rapidly. More advancements are ahead, and the market for AI in China is one to be expected.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay