WAIC 2023: AI, LLMs, and more hopes for the future

By SHE Xiaochen

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2023 kicked off on Thursday at Shanghai Expo Center.

Set for three days of conversation and events on the theme of “Intelligent Connectivity, Generating Future,” the event is taking place in real-time and space for the first time since the pandemic.

Speakers include researchers, officials, and executives from Huawei, Microsoft and Tesla, who will show off their moves in large language models (LLM), robots, autonomous driving and AI for industry and science.

Shanghai's Party Secretary CHEN Jining and Mayor GONG Zheng attended the opening ceremony, showing support for AI as one of three strategic industries in the city.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk delivered a speech via video during the opening ceremony with the news that he thinks artificial intelligence will play "a profound role" in the future of the human race. Musk also predicted that fully autonomous driving would be achieved later this year.

"It could be that there is a very positive future, but there's some chance of a negative future, and we should do everything possible to ensure that the negative future does not come to pass," Musk said.

The conference has returned to the real world after five years in the virtual wilderness. An expansive exhibition area of 50,000 square meters has more exhibitors than ever before. Over 30 new products are to be unveiled, spanning fields like smart chips, robots, and the perennial WAIC favorite, autonomous driving.

HOU Yang, chief executive of Microsoft China, said the company planned to integrate AI into Office 365, used by several billion people every day. Microsoft is the major investor in ChatGPT and everyone now seems to have a LLM to show off.

SenseTime is strutting its LLM stuff. The Hong Kong-headquartered AI company specializes in facial recognition, object recognition and autonomous driving.

SenseTime's SenseChat is a large-language model with a billion parameters, boasting imperceptibly different abilities to the other chatbots unveiled this year.

The SenseTime demo included livestreaming with digital humans and showcasing the intelligent basketball courts.

Fears that AI may give rise to a Terminator-like future of humans versus machines will not be assuaged in the slightest by 4Paradigm's SageRA, an LLM that can reconstruct, repair and reproduce software using generative AI.

SageRA was designed for business, featuring multimodal interactions, an app library and a private database.

"AI stations" have been set up all over the event, giving attendees the opportunity to prompt various applications to perform specially rehearsed party tricks. Companies like Baidu and Tencent offer visitors to engage with AI-generated images and creative functionality.

Meituan, China's leading e-commerce platform for services, brought along a new unmanned delivery drone designed for urban logistics. The new robot is a lot less fussy about the weather than previous versions and no longer objects to going out in the rain.

It's one of over 20 intelligent robots on display, including Tesla’s Optimus android (known to all as The Tesla Bot) and Dahoota Dataa’s amusing attempt at a bipedal robot, because apparently it's a good idea to make robots as much like humans as possible.

The Tesla Bot is 173 cm tall, weighs 57 kg and will be controlled by the same AI system Tesla is developing for its cars. The bot can currently carry 20 kg and has been designed to relieve humans of dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks, like working on the Tesla production line, for example.

Keenon Robotics provides autonomous robots and drones for global enterprises mainly focused on cleaning, catering and maintenance of exhibition spaces like the Shanghai Expo Center.

Keenon medical delivery robots are capable of autonomous operations in complex environments. They can also collaborate with other robots on various medical tasks. Keenon is partner of Sofitel, Westins and Hilton hotels.

In the metaverse, Xmov - an AI company focusing on computer vision and computer graphics - wheeled out a virtual human, Jing. It is capable of understanding natural language and responding intelligently.

Considered the most high-profile AI event in China, the WAIC attracted over 600,000 offline visitors and witnessed the signing of 200 major industrial projects with a combined investment of 70 billion yuan over the last five editions.