Published on : 05/02/2024
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was held in Shanghai from July 6th to 8th, showcasing a variety of artificial intelligence applications and robot products.
It is well known that the WAIC is regarded as a global indicator for the AI industry and a stage for tech companies to showcase their strength.
During this year's event, various AI robots showed off their abilities, such as playing chess, writing calligraphy, performing dance, playing basketball and making coffee.
Let's review the cutting-edge technology products at this conference!
Elon Musk: China will possess strong AI capability
Shanghai has hosted the World Artificial Intelligence Conference for the sixth consecutive year, and the theme of this event is "Connecting Intelligence and the Future".
The number of participating enterprises and exhibition area of this conference hit a record high, with more than 400 enterprises participating and more than 30 new products being first released and exhibited, covering areas like large language models(LLM), chips, robots, and intelligent driving.
During the three-day exhibition period, the conference connected with 210 upstream and downstream enterprises, reached a procurement amount of 11 billion yuan, promoted the signing of 32 major industrial projects, and the total project investment amounted to 28.8 billion yuan.
US electric car manufacturer Tesla's CEO Elon Musk spoke via video, sharing his views on AI. He believes that there will be a large number of robots on Earth in the future, even outnumbering the human population.
Musk also affirmed the contributions of Chinese talents in the field of artificial intelligence, saying that China will have a very powerful artificial intelligence capability in the future.
Read more: Hong Kong's research into the development of AI Supercomputing Centres
More than 20 robots show their talents at WAIC
At this World Artificial Intelligence Conference, more than 20 robots of different types appeared, including humanoid robots, hyper-realistic virtual humans, logistic drones, etc., and Tesla Bot, the bionic robot from Tesla's booth, was one of them.
The humanoid robot named Optimus is Tesla's cutting-edge achievement in the field of artificial intelligence.
The robot is 172cm tall and weighs 56.6 kg, with 28 degrees of freedom throughout the body, just like human joints. The hand has 11 degrees of freedom, which can grasp flexibly and is extremely strong, able to lift a piano with one hand.
According to the introduction, Tesla's Optimus robot has the ability to protect itself and the people around it. In the future, it can cook, mow lawns, take care of the elderly, or replace humans in doing dangerous work in factories.
An intelligent service robot named Ginger, presented by Mainland China enterprise CloudMinds, also attracted a lot of spectators.
After accessing RobotGPT, Ginger can engage in "question and answer" interactions with the audience and play various roles. For example, Ginger can perform "Thousand-Hand Guanyin" as a dancer, perform shooting as as a basketball player, and even make coffee at the venue and serve it to the audience.
Read more: AI robot restaurant in Greater Bay Area - a new trend in China's tech
AI masters composing and painting
In addition to robots, large language models were also popular at this World Artificial Intelligence Conference. More than 30 Chinese AI large models such as SenseNova by SenseTime, Ernie Bot by Baidu, Spark Desk by iFlytek, Pangu by Huawei, and Tongyi Qianwen by Alibaba were on display.
AI large language models are a type of pre-training model used for machine learning. After large amounts of data training, they can handle speech, images, and text data, thus achieving efficient and accurate automated processing in various application fields.
Artificial intelligence content (AIGC) large models, such as Baidu's Wenxin Yige, Tencent's multimedia lab XMusi and SenseTime's SenseMirage, have all demonstrated AI's creative ability.
"Wenxin Yige" is an AI art and creativity support platform launched by Baidu, aimed at people with design needs and creativity, creating diverse AI creative images based on Wenxin's large model, assisting creative design and providing various creative ideas.
"XMusic" generates emotionally-controlled music by taking films, pictures, texts, tags, humming, etc. as input prompts, creating exclusive music for users.
As for SenseTime's latest version of "SenseMirage", it can create images based on the input images or text, and can generate corresponding portraits in as fast as two seconds.
Read more: 1.09 million enterprises | Where does China's AI development rank in the world?
