ANN/CHINA DAILY – The Chinese government has unequivocally put the development of the domestic artificial intelligence (AI) industry high on its agenda – and this should help allay any lingering concerns that the country is lagging behind advanced economies in key technologies, experts said.
The latest concerns arose in February when United States (US) firm OpenAI, which had created a sensation with ChatGPT, launched a text-to-video model called Sora, sending ripples through China’s AI industry. Reactions ranged from admiration and appreciation to “AI anxiety”.
Why weren’t groundbreaking technologies like ChatGPT and Sora emerging in China? Is the AI gap between China and the United States widening? Has China lost the tech plot? Has its innovation drive lost its edge? Questions like that have stoked anxiety among both netizens and industry experts alike.
It is natural to have such anxiety, but what it indicates really is the underlying sense of urgency to catch up with huge changes brought by cutting-edge technologies, said deputy chief engineer of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Shen Hao.
Industry insiders believe Sora – it allows users to create photo-realistic videos up to a minute-long, all based on prompts they have written – will actually end up narrowing the AI gap between China and the US. For, Chinese companies will likely soon ramp up their efforts to make similar products, given their unique advantages.
But they also believe Sora is a wake-up call for China as it shows there is a gap with US counterparts in terms of AI development, especially in aspects like computing power and talent.
“The gap between China and the US in AI mainly lies in (tech) direction. Once the direction is settled, Chinese companies can quickly catch up using their rapid learning capabilities,” said founder and chairman of 360 Security Technology Zhou Hongyi who is also a member of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body.
Zhou explained that the direction could be transformer, a deep learning model that learns context and meaning by tracking relationships in sequential data. Both ChatGPT and Sora are based on transformers.
“There is a gap between China and the US in terms of AI development. But the gap is not as big as the one in semiconductor lithography machines. Considering that transformer, Sora or Sora-like products are all fundamentally ‘software’, such an AI gap between China and the US can be bridged within one to two years,” Zhou said.
From December to February, more than 10 A-share companies operating in AI-related fields, including Wondershare, BroadV, Eclicktech and Hanvon Technology, had all disclosed their investment and progress in the development of text-to-video models.
Although the current text-to-video technologies developed by Chinese companies are less effective than Sora, industry experts believe that China already has all the core infrastructure required to develop Sora-like products, including large language models, DALL.E 3, large-scale video data sets and AI computing power systems .
LLMs serve as foundation models, or general-purpose models pre-trained on huge datasets. DALL.E 3 is an AI system that takes a text prompt as input and generates a new image as output.
Secretary-general of the IEEE metaverse standards committee and chairman of the IEEE metaverse standards working group Ma Xin said that Sora does have a strong visual impact, but it does not break away from ChatGPT and DALL.E to reach another level.
“Sora’s capabilities are all perceived – they exist only in people’s minds. In the short term, it can only help improve efficiency, in terms of interaction with people, but it’s not possible to truly penetrate the industrial field,” Ma said.
Analyst Zhou Chengxiong from the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “Although most of the current major breakthroughs in AI technology emerge from US companies, latecomers also have obvious advantages.
“For instance, latecomers face fewer risks and uncertainties during the progress.”
China has a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of the world in the application of AI technologies in the future, he said.
Senior expert from the Tencent Research Institute Wang Peng concurred. Wang said Sora’s launch further proves that diffusion transformer is a feasible direction for multi-modal AI.
DiTs adhere to the best practices of vision transformers, which have been shown to scale more effectively for visual recognition than traditional convolutional networks.
“It is still possible for major Chinese AI manufacturers to leverage existing resources to catch up with Sora’s current level in about a year,” he said.
