TESLA JOINS CHINESE TECH COMPANIES IN SHOWING OFF AI ADVANCES
People look at Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China on July 5, 2024.
China’s tech companies and startups showed off more than 1,500 artificial intelligence-related products and models at the country’s largest AI conference in Shanghai this week.
The 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which started Thursday and ends Saturday, also featured U.S. companies including Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. This year’s theme, “Governing AI for Good and for All,” focused on China’s AI development efforts amid U.S. sanctions on advanced chips and chipmaking tools, the South China Morning Post reports.
SenseTime, a facial recognition technology company which has faced sanctions over connections to human rights abuse, announced its SenseNova 5.5 large language model (LLM) at the conference, which it says rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Executives at the conference said they are optimistic about the country’s AI industry despite U.S. sanctions on technology needed for AI development, Reuters reports.
“Nobody will deny that we are facing limited computing power in China,” said Zhang Ping’an, head of cloud computing unit at Huawei, which is under U.S. sanctions. “If we believe that not having the most advanced AI chips means we will be unable to lead in AI, then we need to abandon this viewpoint.”
Huawei has been on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s trade blacklist since 2019, but has been able to receive advanced chipmaking tools from U.S. companies with a special license to sell to such Chinese firms. The company is reportedly having a hard time increasing production of its Ascend 910B artificial intelligence chip — China’s best alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips, which cannot be sold to Chinese customers under U.S. trade restrictions.
Meanwhile, Tesla displayed its humanoid robot Optimus behind glass at the conference on Thursday. The second-generation humanoid robot, which is not yet at full-scale production, is “capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring,” the company says. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s annual shareholders meeting last month that robots will eventually power the company to a $30 trillion market cap.
2024-07-05T16:20:17Z dg43tfdfdgfd