Waic Shanghai: China Reveals New Great Leap Forward With 1,509 Ai Models

China is now home to 1,509 AI models, which accounts for more than 40 per cent of the world’s total, according to data from the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, showing the country’s great leap forward in the fast-growing technology.

There are 3,755 total AI models known worldwide, according to a Xinhua report on Monday, citing WAIC data.

Tencent Holdings and SenseTime on Sunday launched new AI models at the conference. Tencent’s Hunyuan 3D World Model 1.0 showed its prowess in generating detailed three-dimensional environments, while SenseTime touted improvements in reinforced learning efficiency delivered by SenseNova V6.5.

“We see AI enabling scalable and cost-efficient production of multimodal content across text, images, audio and video,” said UBS Securities analyst Wei Xiong, who pointed out that Chinese models were “showing early success in AI video generation”.

China shows off latest AI innovations at international conference in Shanghai

The number of AI models reflects the country’s big strides in transforming into an AI powerhouse through various private and publicly backed open-source development initiatives, narrowing the gap with the US.

The open-source approach gives the public access to a programme’s source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities.

According to the American benchmarking platform LMArena, created by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, China has become home to the world’s top open-source AI models.

While American AI giants such as OpenAI and Meta Platforms did not take part in this year’s WAIC, which concluded on Monday, mainland Big Tech firms from Alibaba Group Holding to Huawei Technologies showcased their latest AI-related developments. Alibaba owns the Post.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba unveiled its latest large multimodal model, powered by its Qwen AI model family, which was specifically designed for intelligent automotive cockpits.

This was jointly developed with US mobile chip firm Qualcomm and Banma, Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider.

On the AI hardware side, domestic semiconductor enterprises – including Huawei and start-ups such as Moore Threads and Tencent-backed Enflame – displayed their latest AI processor technologies.

Huawei, which occupied a central space at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Centre, showed to the public for the first time its Supernode 384 system – which is a cluster of 384 Ascend AI processors – spread across 12 computing cabinets and four bus cabinets.

That system delivers 300 petaflops of computing power and 48 terabytes of high-bandwidth memory, gaining attention in China as an alternative to Nvidia’s NVL72 system. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

WAIC also showed a rising trend among domestic AI infrastructure suppliers to join forces in building commercial computing resources amid the strong demand for advanced computing power in China’s AI sector.

SenseTime on Sunday unveiled a “compute mall” initiative with more than 10 domestic partners – including chip design firms Huawei, Hygon Information Technology, Cambricon Technologies, Biren Technology and Moore Threads – that would allow AI developers to freely combine and allocate a variety of computing resources, platform tools and AI model services just like “purchasing goods” at a supermarket.

“The overall share of domestically produced computing power remains very low, likely even below 10 per cent,” said Chen Daliang, CEO of Suanova – a Shanghai-based AI computing resources provider and a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Yeebo Technology.

“The primary reasons are the market’s lack of confidence in new domestic products and the absence in China of a company comparable to Nvidia that can offer comprehensive, full-stack solutions,” Chen told the Post in an interview on Sunday.

“What China needs most now is unity – and that’s what we are good at.”

Suanova was involved in the Shanghai Cube project, a high-density computing initiative involving several domestic firms and institutions, including AI chip firms MetaX, computing infrastructure provider Infinigence AI, Fudan University and Apple supplier Luxshare Precision Industry.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang kicked off WAIC on Saturday, calling for the establishment of an international centre to coordinate global AI cooperation.

While the WAIC organiser has yet to disclose the number of visitors at this year’s event, this figure was expected to be higher than the 2024 event’s 300,000 visitors, which was a record high since the conference started in 2018.