BEIJING: No country, including the United States, can single-handedly lead the future development of artificial intelligence (AI), and only global cooperation can ensure that AI will remain safe and beneficial for all, say experts and company executives at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024 in Boao, Hainan province.

Their remarks were an attempt to address “AI anxiety” among sections of the Chinese AI industry following the launch of text-to-video generator Sora by US firm OpenAI.

Zeng Yi, a researcher of the Institute of Automation, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a member of the United Nations High-level Advisory Body on AI, said: “The US will not lead the future AI development alone, nor will China. Unless we move forward hand in hand, no country will.”

Zeng emphasised that AI is a foundational technology and an enabler.

“The world is vast enough to allow China, the United States and many other countries to find their own opportunities in building infrastructure and driving applications.

“If the culture of China differs from that of the United States, then please provide a profound understanding of how a different culture might envision the empowerment of technology in the future and how we can deeply integrate science and humanity to offer more possibilities for the world.”

The more pressing issue, he said, is how the world can unite to truly develop AI that is safer, more reliable and more trustworthy.

Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and a leading AI researcher, said that competition in the field is by and large healthy, but the idea of a zero-sum game is a “huge mistake”.

“If AI can be created to be safe and beneficial, and more capable than human beings, then it can function as a source of unlimited wealth,” he said. “In that sense, there is no need to compete for such technology.”

Russell further said that a more important issue is to coexist healthily and safely with this technology, which is still an open question for the world.

Chinese tech companies such as iFlytek, Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Baidu Inc, ByteDance and Huawei Technologies as well as thousands of startups are scrambling to develop AI models. Many of them have gathered momentum over the past year.

 - China Daily