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Artificial intelligence
TechTech Trends

China’s biggest AI conference kicks off this week with Qualcomm as the sole US sponsor amid escalating tech rivalry

  • Chinese tech giants, including sanctions-hit Huawei and SenseTime, are the main attraction at the three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai
  • Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla will all be at the conference, but the number of US sponsors has declined since 2019

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A staff member at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference looks at a robot at the venue in Shanghai on July 9, 2020. Photo: Reuters
Tracy Quin Shanghai
China kicks off its annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai this week in a showcase of Beijing’s AI ambitions amid a deepening technological rivalry with the US.
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The annual event, which is hosted by several government ministries, has attracted China’s top AI firms and institutions. The published agenda that runs from Thursday to Saturday is dominated by local firms and speakers, with some big international names conspicuously missing. Most notably, Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, will not be in attendance.
With domestic regulators flagging risks about generative AI, ChatGPT and similar services such as Google’s Bard are unlikely to be allowed into the Chinese market, making AI another closed garden inside the Great Firewall that could benefit local tech giants.

According to the Shanghai government, the event has attracted more than 400 enterprises, at least 30 of which are developers of their own large language models (LLMs), the tech that drives products like ChatGPT.

Several Big Tech firms are among the event’s 10 “strategic partners”, or main sponsors. Alibaba Group Holding, its fintech affiliate Ant Group and Tencent Holdings are all on the list. Huawei Technologies and SenseTime, both sanctioned by the US, are sponsoring the conference as well. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
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The other partners on the list are the Bank of Communications, investment firm Citic Group, state-owned telecoms operators China Telecom and China Mobile, and Transwarp, a big-data infrastructure software developer.
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