China has approved its 15th Five-Year Plan [PDF] setting out the country’s economic, education, social, and industrial priorities through to 2030. As might be expected, there is a significant number of references to AI, with the technology mentioned in several contexts.
AI is grouped alongside quantum computing, biotechnology, and energy as paths that are to be pursued as part of the country’s strategic science policy. The document calls for more work in developing high-performance AI chips and the software to support them in this context. There’s also a commitment to academic and industry research on new model architectures and the core algorithms underpinning them.
Development to communications technologies such as satellite systems, 5G+ (sometimes referred to as 5G-A or 5G Advanced) and 6G networks is to support AI workloads as part of a broader push to improve the country’s infrastructure for data transmion, general communication and data processing.
In the section of the Five-Year Plan dedicated to digital infrastructure, the use of AI falls into three components: computing power, AI models, and the organisation and dissemination of data across China.
The government calls for national computing hubs described as “intelligent computing clusters”, and proposes market mechanisms such as the lease of computeing resources to give access to a large a swathe of the population as possible. There are also to be new ways in which government bodies will procure the computing services they need. The compute hubs the government proposes are also intended to reduce the barriers smaller firms face to access the very latest in technology.
The government wants the theoretical work behind model training and inference to continue as research and in manufacturing, and refers specifically to multi-modal, agent-based, and “embodied” AI. It sees the technology as playing an increasing role in areas of the economy like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, and service industries. It cites industrial design, production processes, general operations, energy system management, and agricultural production as areas where the use of AI should be increased and encouraged. In the service sector, the text calls out the finance, logistics, and software services sectors.
For the general technology-using Chinese consumer, the government wants to see an increase in the number and type of AI-enabled devices, including phones, computers, and robots, and links the use of AI to education, healthcare, care for the elderly care, and social service provision. In these settings, it envisages adaptive learning systems in education, diagnostic support in healthcare, and welfare system management.
At the national and local government levels, the Five-Year Plan wants the digital services provided by all elements of the public sector to increase in scope and ability, based on integrated data systems built around standard models. It calls for the use of AI models in general administration, and the assessment of risk to public safety.
The government is generally quite conservative in its approach to cooperation with other nations, suggesting that it may be possible for the country to participate with outside organisations on international standards around data flows and infrastructure.
The issue of governance and regulation of data forms a relatively substantial part of the discussion in the document, calling for specific leagal and regulatory frameworks for AI, including rules on the registration of new algorithms, security, and overall transparency. It cites common risks to AI use that may affect the economy, including data misuse and deepfakes.
Given the size of the country’s population, it’s perhaps not surprising that there is little mention of specific steps the country will take to ensure its role in the evolution of AI. Over the course of the next five years, the details are more likely to emerge as events observable by China-watchers. But as the pages of this site can attest, the country’s chosen path for AI rests more on smaller, open, freely-available, efficient models than the approach more common in the West: large, proprietary models controlled by two or three major players based on hardware from mostly one supplier.
The details of the Chinese government’s implementations of AI in its economy will inform observers of whether the next five years will continue China’s chosen course, or whether the West’s ideology around the technology will force a change of approach.
(Image source: “Beijing skyline from northeast 4th ring road (cropped)” by Picrazy2 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
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