Beijing released three documents to promote the development of AI within 12 days in May: the Beijing General Artificial Intelligence Industry Innovation Partnership Program on May 19; the Beijing Promotion Several Measures for the Innovation and Development of General Artificial Intelligence and the Implementation Plan for Beijing to Accelerate the Construction of a Globally Influential Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center (2023-2025) on May 30.
Coordinate the supply of computing resources and strengthen domestic chips
Computing power is the basic element for training large language models (LLM), and the development of large language models also brings huge challenges to computing power. At present, computing power is an element that needs to be addressed and improved urgently in the innovation of general artificial intelligence.
In terms of computing power, Several Measures propose to enhance the ability to coordinate and supply computing power resources. On the one hand, organize commercial computing power to meet urgent needs: implement the computing power partnership plan, strengthen cooperation with cloud vendors, and provide diversified high-quality inclusive computing power; on the other hand, promote the construction of new computing power infrastructure: accelerate the promotion of construction of computing power centers to form large-scale advanced computing power supply capabilities; in addition, build a unified multi-cloud computing power scheduling platform to achieve unified management and unified operation, and improve the integrated dispatching capability of computing power in the area around Beijing.
In terms of hardware carrying computing power—chips, the Implementation Plan emphasizes the word “domestic”. The document proposes to actively guide large-scale model R&D enterprises to apply domestic artificial intelligence chips, accelerate the improvement of the localization rate of artificial intelligence computing power supply; strengthen the deployment and application of domestic chips, and promote independent controllable software and hardware computing power ecology Construction; establish a full-stack localized artificial intelligence innovation consortium, develop a full-stack localized generative large model, and gradually form an independent and controllable artificial intelligence technology system and industrial ecology.
Building a high-quality pre-training Chinese corpus
Data is an important bottleneck in the development of large-scale Chinese language models. In terms of building high-quality data sets, Several Measures proposed three specific implementation directions. First, organize relevant institutions to integrate and clean Chinese pre-training data to form a safe and compliant open basic training data set. Explore and promote the authorized operation of public data areas, and promote the docking of public data and market-oriented data platforms; second, plan and build data training bases, improve the scale and quality of data annotation databases, and explore commercial scenario cooperation based on data contributions and model applications; third, construction crowdsourcing service platforms for fine-grained annotation of datasets, encouraging professionals to participate in annotation, and researching the incentive mechanism of the platform.
The Implementation Plan emphasizes the need to strengthen the open sharing of public data. Focus on areas such as city brain, smart government affairs, and smart people’s livelihood services, dynamically update the public data open plan, and improve the construction of various public data areas such as finance, transportation, and space.
Develop a basic theoretical system for general artificial intelligence
The Implementation Plan shows that Beijing plans to develop a basic theoretical framework system for the new generation of artificial intelligence, focusing on the mathematical mechanism of artificial intelligence, big data intelligence, multimodal intelligence, decision-making intelligence, brain-like intelligence, scientific intelligence, embodied intelligence, etc.
Several Measures clearly propose to explore new paths of general artificial intelligence such as general intelligence, embodied intelligence, and brain-like intelligence. Support value and causality-driven general agent research, create a unified theoretical framework system, rating standards, and testing platform, develop operating systems and programming languages, and promote the application of the underlying technical architecture of general agents. Promote the research and application of embodied intelligence systems, and make breakthroughs in the perception, cognition, and decision-making technologies of robots under complex conditions such as open environments, generalized scenarios, and continuous tasks. Support the exploration of brain-inspired intelligence, study core technologies such as brain neuron connection patterns, coding mechanisms, and information processing, and inspire new artificial neural network model modeling and training methods.
Among them, the “embodied intelligence” refers to intelligent bodies that have a body and support physical interaction, such as home service robots and unmanned vehicles.
It is worth noting that the Several Measures also proposed to encourage third-party non-profit organizations to build multi-modal and multi-dimensional basic model evaluation benchmarks and evaluation methods; to study artificial intelligence-assisted model evaluation algorithms, and to develop models that include versatility, efficiency.
Focus on six scenarios
Several Measures propose to promote the application of general artificial intelligence technology innovation scenarios, focusing on six major scenarios of government services, medical care, scientific research, finance, autonomous driving, and urban governance.
Implementation Plan emphasizes that relying on Beijing’s superior scene resources, it is necessary to accelerate the convergence of capital, technology, data, computing power, talents, and other elements, create a batch of benchmarking demonstration application scenarios that can be replicated and promoted, and promote the artificial intelligence innovation chain. The industrial chain, the capital chain, and the talent chain are deeply integrated. In addition, support artificial intelligence to empower the construction of smart cities and high-level autonomous driving demonstration zones.
The Partner Program mentions some more specific scenarios such as Window of the Capital’s intelligent question-and-answer and online guides, text creation, human-computer interaction, education, audio-visual applications.
Create an inclusive and prudent regulatory environment
In terms of supervision, the wording of the document is “inclusive and prudent”. Inclusion Is to encourage the innovation and development of domestic general artificial intelligence at the current stage and to allow enterprises to try and make mistakes by establishing pilot projects (demonstration areas, test areas), thereby accelerating the formation of several benchmark demonstration cases, and accelerating the development of the entire industry. Prudence, on the other hand, starts from the perspective of security and compliance and considers the impact of network security, data security, and other new risks that arise in the development process on the country, society, and individuals. Therefore, timely regulatory intervention in the market is required.
Talent highland and government investment fund
The Implementation Plan aims to build a group of artificial intelligence scientific research institutions with world-class influence, to introduce and cultivate world-class innovative talent teams, and to make breakthroughs in international talent introduction. The number of high-level scholars exceeds 10,000, and the domestic proportion remains at the leading position.
According to IDC, Beijing ranks first in the list of China’s artificial intelligence cities in 2022. As of November 2022, Beijing leads the country in 17 AI-related fields. According to China’s Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, at least 79 large-scale models with a scale of more than 1 billion parameters have been released in China, and Beijing accounts for 38, ranking first.
To some extent, how Beijing formulates and implements policies in the development of artificial intelligence has a national demonstration effect, which shows that China is accelerating the cultivation of local artificial intelligence pioneers through strengthening state support.
(Source: sina, Aliyun, the paper, 24hourswork)
