China’s AI event World Intelligence Expo attracts few foreign firms in Tianjin amid global rift
- The four-day event was made up mostly of Chinese companies showing off electric cars and robots, as foreign firms continue to sit out Chinese industry events
Few foreign firms showed up at the event, and the speaker list was dominated by Chinese tech executives, the Post observed during a Saturday visit. About 20 foreign firms, or 4 per cent of the 550 exhibitors, had booths at the Tianjin expo, most of which were grouped together in a corner of one of the eight exhibition sections, where foot traffic was light.
Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the World Intelligence Expo, calling for more global cooperation in AI development. The US, however, has been ramping up efforts to curb China’s access to advanced chips and AI technologies.
The US Treasury Department on Friday issued draft rules to deter investment in China’s chip, AI, and quantum computing sectors on national security grounds. Under these rules, investments from American entities in those areas would require official approval.
At the booth of Tianjin Infrastructure Investment Group, a rotating slide deck playing on a TV screen acknowledged the bottlenecks that Chinese companies face when trying to produce advanced chips, noting the lack of access to advanced lithography machines, precision materials and other parts of the chip-making process.
“The AI industry is the large-scale cluster computing between graphics processing units and optical modules,” one slide read. “But the development of our electronic chips is challenged by the chokehold on our access to advanced manufacturing processes.”
The infrastructure investment group is investing in optical chips technology to overcome these obstacles, it added.
Some foreign business delegates at the show were still looking for business opportunities. Heesun Yoon, an executive at South Korean lidar developer SOS Lab, said that China remains a huge market that cannot be ignored.
“We are here because the China market is much bigger than many other markets,” Yoon said.
Alibaba Cloud’s ‘AI programmer’ gets mixed reactions from real programmers
- The launch of the AI programmer comes seven months after the introduction of Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud’s first AI coding assistant
Introduced by Alibaba Cloud, the AI programmer aims to help developers shorten development time for applications, in some cases down to minutes, the company said in a statement on Friday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Functioning as a “multi-intelligence agent”, the AI programmer combines the roles of software architect, development engineer, and test engineer to achieve end-to-end product functionality, according to the statement.
“The development paradigm for software applications is changing,” Xu Dong, general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen LLM service, said at the company’s Cloud AI summit in Shanghai on Friday.
“In the future, users only need to identify problems and express requirements, and completing an application development in minutes will become the norm,” Xu said.
Alibaba Cloud said the AI programmer could handle tasks such as decomposition, code writing, testing and debugging, deployed all at once through multiple conversations with the user.
During a live demonstration at the summit, the AI programmer created an application from scratch within 10 minutes, a process the company said might take half a day using traditional methods.
Human programmers, however, have expressed mixed feelings about the product. Liang Yan, a developer who has worked in the cryptocurrency industry for four years, said the AI programmer might be a threat.
“My job is mainly about choosing open source projects and learning from them,” said Liang. “It’s not only about meeting the requirements, but it’s also a way to understand the programme.”
Although the AI programmer may save time in development, it may prevent programmers from understanding what they are doing, according to Liang. It also reduces opportunities for novice programmers, he said.
Yang Yi, a developer working for a Chinese Big Tech company who has tried other coding tools similar AI programmer, said these tools are still in an early stage of development.
“I asked AI to write specific code, but it generated code that was not so reliable, sometimes with grammatical or factual errors,” Yang said. “It reduces the workload, but not completely.”
The launch of the AI programmer comes seven months after the introduction of Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud’s first AI coding assistant, which is also powered by Tongyi Qianwen.
Trained on open-source code, Tongyi Lingma is able to generate code based on natural language instructions, run unit tests, and debug and optimise code.
The basic version of Tongyi Lingma is free for individual users, while the corporate version – with additional management features – is available for a monthly fee of 159 yuan (US$22) per person with a minimum of 100 users.
The newly introduced AI programmer, which targets both individual and corporate developers, is not yet publicly available. Pricing details have not been disclosed, according to the company.
