China ‘needs to focus on boosting domestic AI sector to close gap on US’ as export curbs on chips take their toll
- Panel discussion at Boao Forum in Hainan hears there is belief in the industry that China is lagging behind on generative AI
- One industry leader says developing Chinese hardware and software is key to being able to challenge the likes of ChatGPT
China’s artificial intelligence firms need to focus on developing their own hardware and software if they want to catch up with US market leaders, industry leaders have said.
Liu Cong, the vice president of Chinese AI firm iFlytek, admitted the consensus in China was that “we still have a gap” to close on the world leaders in generative AI during a panel discussion at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan province on Wednesday.
While the country has been running to catch up, he said the key focus must be on achieving “independently owned and controlled hard- and software”, especially in large language models (LLM).
LLMs are the deep-learning AI algorithms behind chatbots such as ChatGPT that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict, and generate content using very large data sets.
Export curbs on semiconductor chips, which are used to process the LLMs, are one of the major hurdles to Chinese generative AI development.
