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Beijing is latest city to host AI conference amid ChatGPT frenzy

Beijing is the latest Chinese city set to host a large artificial intelligence (AI) conference this year, with the February 13 event to be attended by Big Tech players including Huawei Technologies and Baidu, which comes as the country is gripped by a ChatGPT frenzy amid global excitement over the technology from San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI.

The city’s Mentougou district government announced the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Innovation and Development Conference in a post to its official WeChat account on Wednesday. The local government is a sponsor of the event and said the conference is meant to promote the city’s AI industry.

Government officials and industry players are scheduled to attend the event, where companies will showcase their tech’s business applications to “explore opportunities of AI and build up an open, win-win ecosystem”.

The event shows how AI is receiving increased attention from local Chinese governments as an emerging technology that could potentially be used to upgrade other industries.

Shanghai has been hosting the annual World AI Conference since 2018 as a venue for the country to showcase its achievements in the industry and communicate with global leaders in the field.

Tianjin, a port city southeast of Beijing, also announced this week that it will host the World Intelligence Conference in May to pull together China’s leading AI experts and executives to discuss the tech’s future, according to a notice published to the municipal technology bureau’s website.

Separately, Shenzhen will host the Artificial Intelligence Exhibition in mid-May after being pushed back from the original date last November as a result of China’s strict zero-Covid controls.

Governments’ increasing show of support for AI comes as investment in the industry has surged thanks to a flurry of new product launches from tech giants including Microsoft and Google.

Tech giants have rushed to respond to the overwhelming popularity of ChatGPT, which has shown a surprising level of competence in responding to sophisticated prompts.

OpenAI’s new product amassed more than 100 million monthly active users by January, just two months after its launch, making it the world’s fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a recent UBS note.

Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, has started to integrate ChatGPT tech into its own products, including its Bing search engine. Google has also responded by trialling a similar service based on its LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) neural language models.

Chinese companies, including Baidu, a partner of the Beijing AI event, have also jumped on the bandwagon.

While some companies’ claims of baking ChatGPT-like services into their businesses appear to be little more than public relations stunts, Beijing-based Baidu has been investing heavily in AI and autonomous driving for years.

On Tuesday, the internet search giant said its own AI chat service called Ernie Bot would launch in March.

Shares of Baidu surged more than 13 per cent in Hong Kong on the news.

Lu Yanxia, a research director with IT consultancy IDC, said that despite the headlines, ChatGPT’s impact on the market will be limited in the short term.

“In the long run, these [AI chatbot] models will retreat from the market,” Lu wrote in a note about ChatGPT. “The real revelation is that these language models will evolve and contribute to the advent of general AI.” South China Morning Post

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