ChinAI #228: Around the Horn (11th edition)

Greetings from a world where…

how is Survivor still so fun to watch

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Around the Horn (11th edition)

Every two months or so, it’s fun to take a tour Around the Horn. How it works:

• I give short previews of ten articles related to ChinAI (all published within the past week or so). See ChinAI #216 for the previous iteration.

• Readers choose next week’s feature translation by replying to the email and/or commenting on the post with the number of their favorite article. *I give a little added weight to readers who financially support ChinAI through paid subscriptions.

• The title for each preview links to the original article in Chinese.

• The idea here is that any of these 10 links would have made for a great feature translation this week — like Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, there’s no skips!

1) Compatible with 20+ chip manufacturers, Mindspore’s large-scale models have traveled far and wide

Summary: In past issues, I’ve noted China’s efforts to build its own open-source AI frameworks (the “operating systems” of the AI ecosystem). Along with Baidu’s PaddlePaddle, Huawei’s MindSpore is one of the two main Chinese AI frameworks. This article summarizes MindSpore’s progress since its release in March 2020.

Source: 机器之心 (jiqizhixin) — media portal that covers China’s science and tech landscape, with a focus on AI-related happenings.

2) A “whirlwind” 200 days for China’s OpenAI: making PPTs, difficult to land

Summary: Gives more details about how Chinese competitors to ChatGPT have been overhyped — in line with my Foreign Affairs piece about how Chinese large language models lag behind U.S. competitors. It cites a very interesting report that analyzes 79 Chinese large models [中国人工智能大模型地图研究报告], recently published by a group of research institutions that includes the New Generation AI development research center of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

*If anyone wants to help translate this report, let me know!

Source: 钛媒体 (TMTPost) — influential digital media outlet focused on technology, media, and lifestyle.

3) Why did Tencent launch an industrial large model first?

Summary: While we’ve seen Baidu and Alibaba launch high-profile large language models, Tencent has held back. Why? At a summit on June 19, Tencent Cloud launched a large-scale model that is directly targeted at the to-business market. This article connects to a point I made in ChinAI #222, where I hypothesized that China’s regulatory approach to generative AI would push providers to target to-business applications.

Source: 虎嗅 (Huxiu) — well-known platform that shares user-generated content but also publishes their own pieces on China’s science and technology ecosystem.

4) Report on global autonomous driving strategy and policy observations: policies that open up L4 autonomous driving commercial applications

Summary: The latest report from CAICT distills some takeaways from global policies on autonomous driving. It also gives an update on the L4 autonomous driving landscape in China, with special attention to policies and regulations that might accelerating the development of this industry.

Source: 中国信通院 (CAICT) — The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology is a think tank under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

5) First time reaching the top in 10 years! CVPR 2023 awards announced: Shanghai AI Lab/Wuhan University/SenseTime breaks records to win first prize

Summary: An update from the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), one of the top AI conferences. It covers some notable projects from Chinese labs, including the first best paper prize awarded to a Chinese university at the three top computer vision conferences in the past decade.

Source: 新智元 (xinzhiyuan) — media portal similar to Leiphone, tend to feature more human-interest stories

6) AI, currently polluting the Chinese internet

Summary: Researchers have raised concerns that, just like plastic waste is contaminating the oceans, AI-generated outputs will pollute the internet. This article probes examples of this phenomenon on the Chinese internet, including AI-generated answers in Zhihu threads and fake news generation (e.g., a viral article headlined: “Murder at Zhengzhou Chicken Shop, Man Beats Woman to Death with Brick!”

Source: 知识分子 (The Intellectual) — a platform that covers the state of science in China, founded by Chinese and Chinese-American scientists.

7) In the era of AGI, why does business security need a “new evolution”?

Summary: This piece examines new vulnerabilities posed by the ChatGPT wave. relying on interviews with Chinese experts on information security, it reviews the history of digitalization and business security, and includes a section on fighting the “great plague” in the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era.

Source: 雷峰网 (Leiphone) — media portal that covers China’s science and tech landscape, with a focus on AI-related happenings.

8) Three thousand Zeku staff cannot believe that the company suddenly dissolved due to lack of funds

Summary: Why did Zeku, Chinese smartphone giant Oppo’s in-house chip design unit, suddenly shutdown last month? Many of the 3,000 laid-off staff do not believe the company’s official reason: lack of funding. This article digs deeper into the dissolution of one of China’s main efforts to develop self-sufficient, advanced chips.

Source: 雷峰网 (Leiphone) — two Leiphone links in this edition!

9) China open source, entering a "new era"

Summary: Chinese developers are the second largest group of contributors to GitHub, and China’s open source community is becoming more and more enmeshed with global networks. What’s next for this open source ecosystem, and how will it manage the tensions between open source and independent innovation?

Source: 脑极体 (Naojiti), a tech media platform based in Tianjin, source of last week’s translation about liquid cooling in data centers.

10) Special Topic Artificial Intelligence Security | Analysis of Domestic and Foreign Policies and Standards on Artificial Intelligence Governance

Summary: Researchers from Alibaba’s standardization department and CAICT analyze AI governance and policies in both China and around the world. The last section includes details about their read on China’s work on AI standards and how that relates to international standards-setting efforts.

Source: 中国信息安全 (China Information Security), an influential academic publication in the field of information security.

Thank you for reading and engaging.

These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.

Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).

Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at chinainewsletter@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jjding99