What could possibly go wrong? The 4-foot-tall humanoid robot that's in front of me seems, quite honestly, a bit drunk. After 30 seconds or so it abruptly stops, then strides toward me with an arm outstretched. The little robot is at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, on the banks of the Huangpu river in Shanghai. The convention center is teeming with humanoids --dancing ones, box-toting ones, robot dog-walking ones doing circuits around trade show booths. A few lie slumped in a corner as their batteries recharge. A Unitree humanoid robot modified for experimental purposes at the BAAI.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently said that China should play a key role in shaping the guardrails that are placed around the technology. "China has some of the best AI talent in the world," Altman said during a talk at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) last week. "Solving alignment for advanced AI systems requires some of the best minds from around the world--and so I really hope that Chinese AI researchers will make great contributions here." Altman is in a good position to opine on these issues. His company is behind ChatGPT, the chatbot that's shown the world how rapidly AI capabilities are progressing.

AI Researcher, Cognitive Technologist Inventor - AI Thinking, Think Chain Innovator - AIOT, XAI, Autonomous Cars, IIOT Founder Fisheyebox Spatial Computing Savant, Transformative Leader, Industry X.0 Practitioner At what stage of development are #artificialintelligence and #machinelearning now? We're living exciting times in the Narrow AI of Statistic ML/DL to be replaced by the Causal AI/ML/DL. Are there any new breakthrough results? OpenAI shocked the world a year ago with GPT-3. Google presented LaMDA and MUM, two AIs that will revolutionize chat-bots and the search engine, respectively.

Wu Dao 2.0 has surpassed OpenAI's GPT-3 in so many ways. China could grow to monopolise the language modelling world. Artificial intelligence models have become a strong informal indicator of national and continental progress. Wu Dao 2.0 means enlightenment. It is dubbed as China's first homegrown super-scale intelligent model system, and was led by BAAI Research Academic Vice President and Tsinghua University Professor Tang Jie.

It is no secret that China has COVID-19 under control. When you travel there you need to go through a 2-week hotel quarantine but once you are in the country, you are safe. Probably even safer than before COVID as wearing a mask is now part of the etiquette, and the many other viral respiratory diseases are likely to be on the decline. Hence, when I got invited to speak at the annual conference of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) in the AI for healthcare section, I readily accepted. The BAAI is a great platform for showcasing technology and talent across broad categories.

GPT-3 caused a stir a few months ago when it impressed the world with its capabilities for generating text content. Its 175 million parameters made it look like a true AI giant. Now a new Deep Learning model is making an appearance at an AI event in Beijing. This model, referred to as Wudao, 'natural law understanding', is the world's largest new model with 1750 million parameters. The initial version was presented in March but has been quickly replaced by this larger version.

In the race to build the underlying technologies that can power the next wave of AI revolution, a Chinese lab just toppled OpenAI, the venerated US-based research lab, in terms of who can train a gigantic deep learning model with the most training parameters--as for whether or not there is a race, at least ranking members of the lab believe so. The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, styled as BAAI and known in Chinese as 北京智源人工智能研究院, launched the latest version of Wudao 悟道, a pre-trained deep learning model that the lab dubbed as "China's first," and "the world's largest ever," with a whopping 1.75 trillion parameters. Unlike conventional deep learning models that are usually task-specific, Wudao is a multi-modal model trained to tackle both text and image, two dramatically different sets of problems. At BAAI's annual academic conference on Tuesday, the institution demonstrated Wudao performing tasks such as natural language processing, text generation, image recognition, image generation, etc. The model is capable of writing poems and couplets in the traditional Chinese styles, answer questions, write essays, generate alt text for images, and generate corresponding images from natural language description with a decent level of photorealism. It is even able to power "virtual idols", with the help of XiaoIce, a Chinese company spun off of Microsoft--so there can be voice support too, in addition to text and image.

This week, researchers at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) announced the release of Wu Dao 2.0, a multimodal AI model capable of generating text indiscernible from human-crafted prose -- and more. Containing 1.75 trillion parameters, the parts of the machine learning model learned from historical training data, Wu Dao 2.0 is 10 times larger than OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter GPT- 3. Wu Dao 2.0 is the latest example of what OpenAI policy director Jack Clark calls model diffusion, or multiple state and private actors developing GPT-3-style AI models. For example, Russia and France are training smaller-scale systems via Sberbank and LightOn's PAGnol, while Korea's Naver Labs is investing in the recently created HyperCLOVA. Clark notes that because these models reflect and magnify the data they're trained on, different countries care about how their own cultures are represented in the models. The Wu Dao 2.0 announcement, then, is part of a general trend of nations asserting their own AI capabilities via training frontier models like GPT-3.