WAIC 2020: China’s AI applications aim to rewrite rules in tech, finance

The 2020 edition of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), held in Shanghai on July 9 through July 11 under the theme "Intelligent Connectivity, Invisible Community," highlighted the financial and technological impacts of big data and AI. The summit hosted numerous guest speakers who not only presented world's cutting-edge technologies, products, applications, and ideas, but also revealed trends and impacts of technology applications. On the opening day, industry leaders expressed their viewpoints towards AI, which was published on WAIC’s official website. Huateng Ma, CEO of Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings, said AI is bound to bring about an unprecedented technological and industrial revolution. Tencent is researching and applying new technologies every day, ultimately to serve their users, develop AI for social good, and make AI knowledgeable, controllable, usable, and reliable. This is a project in process for the entire society, he said. Alibaba’s former executive chairman, Jack Ma, said he believes that if digital technology was used to make life better in the past, it will enable humans to survive better from now on. In his view, the pandemic has not changed the trend of technological development but accelerated the transformation of digital technology -- disasters have been forcing us to innovate. Elon Musk delivered a remote speech, saying that level five autonomous driving is indeed achievable by Tesla. He also said that he is interested in the Chinese market environment and would be doing plenty of original project development in China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lNQot3Pcog For the next two days, experienced experts and scholars from international organizations, governments, and AI enterprises voiced their opinions regarding different themes, as reported on Chinese news outlet jiemian.com. At the investment and financing forum, Liming Huang, a partner at private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, delivered a speech on the development trend of AI, summarizing four major changes of AI: First, its applications are changing with the popularization and promotion of the technology; second, AI as an advanced technology is being used daily in the public sphere; third, AI is rapidly integrating with other emerging technologies such as 5G; finally, AI is moving from close source to open source. On the topic of AI chip innovation, Wei Shaojun, director of the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University, stressed the relationship between capital funding and technology research, which is yet to be clarified in China. He called for funding and support from enterprises as well as central and local governments to sustain integrated circuit research and development. At the Robot Process Automation (RPA) industry forum, Xiaohu Zhu, managing partner of GSR Ventures, said he believes that enterprise’ service software has great potential, and smart service platforms will be the bridge between people, enterprises and businesses. According to Zhu, in the next 3-5 years, there may be more enterprise service software with more than $100 billion in market value; and UiPath, the leading RPA company which has recently completed its latest round of capital raising, may exceed $10 billion in its valuation. Regarding blockchain, Ernst & Young (China) Advisory Partner and Head of Blockchain Business Jing Wang said that with the integration of public chains and alliance chains, future industrial Internet system will be based on public chains, using compliant private services, and adopting digital legal tender. Ernst & Young sees all medium and large enterprises conducting transactions on blockchain platforms by 2035-2045, and the industrial Internet and blockchain industry Internet will be at the stage of mature development during 2030-2040.

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