China Vows to Support 10 AI Implementations; Baidu Unveils Its First Quantum Computer; Chinese AI Champion Loses Momentum with 1st Revenue Decline in 5 Years

Weekly China AI News from Aug 22 to Aug 28

News of the Week

Chinese Government Commits Support For AI Development in 10 Industry Applications

What’s new: China’s top government agency rolled out a new plan to support AI development in 10 industry applications — smart farm, smart harbor, smart mine, smart factory, smart home, smart education, autonomous driving, smart diagnosis & treatment, smart court, and smart supply chain.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology said in a recent announcement that the goal is to build benchmark AI applications that can be deployed across the country, solving major application challenges. Distinct from the U.S. approach that spurs the growth of AI in cutting-edge research, the guideline from the Chinese government sets its priority on the integration of AI and real-world applications.

For example, AI technologies used in smart farms should be able to detect soil changes and control agricultural machinery. Autonomous driving-powered vehicles and buses will expand their services from geofenced roads to general complex areas. Smart and remote education technologies are in strong demand in underdeveloped regions.

Why it matters: The announcement will pave the way for the acceleration of these AI developments and benefit correlated enterprises by offering a regulation-friendly environment. A Chinese ministry official said more investments will be poured into R&D organizations, talents, infrastructure, datasets, and supportive regulations. China wants to become the world leader in AI by 2030 with an AI industry worth RMB1 trillion.

Baidu Unveils Its First Quantum Computer With Smartphone Access

What’s new: Chinese AI and search engine giant Baidu introduced its first quantum hardware, a superconducting quantum computer that offers 10-qubit of power. Baidu also expands the access of its quantum hardware to PC, cloud, and even smartphones.

Why it matters: According to the company, quantum computing is expected to bring ground-breaking transformations in fields like artificial intelligence (AI), computational biology, material simulation, and financial technology. However, a significant gap remains between quantum devices and services.

Named “Qian Shi”, which means the origin of all things in Chinese, the quantum computer connects with Baidu’s well-established quantum software stack, from the quantum control system to the cloud computing platform to quantum machine learning toolkits. The full-stack system enables developers and researchers to quickly develop quantum algorithms for battery material designs or protein folding simulation.

While Qian Shi offers only a limited quantum computing power, Baidu has recently completed the design of a 36-qubit superconducting quantum chip and plans to achieve 1000 qubits by 2025.

Baidu’s quantum strategy: Baidu’s quantum software stack also plugs into other third-party quantum computers, including a 10-qubit superconducting quantum device and a trapped ion quantum device developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With the vision of “Everyone can quantum”, Baidu also announced a quantum computing solution for enterprises that offers versatile quantum services through private deployment, cloud services, and hardware access.

Other quantum efforts from China: Zuchongzhi is probably the most high-profile quantum computer in China, a 66-qubit quantum supercomputer that achieves quantum supremacy in the task of random quantum circuit sampling. Alibaba Quantum Laboratory, a unit of Alibaba Group’s DAMO research institute, has also recently developed a 2-qubit quantum processor with a gate fidelity of up to 99.72%.

SenseTime Reports First Revenue Decline in Five Years

What’s new: SenseTime reported a drop in its six-month revenue, the first time in the past five years, due to a macroeconomic slowdown and the zero-covid policy in China.

SenseTime’s total revenue was RMB1.42 billion, a decline of 14.3% year over year. The company’s two main sectors Smart Business and Smart City, which account for 70% of the revenue, dropped 12% and 45% in revenue. SenseTime’s gross profit is RMB930 million, down 22.5% year over year, yielding a gross profit margin of 66%.

SenseTime’s market value has shrunk 60% since its market debut last year.

Why it matters: Chinese tech companies are experiencing their worst quarterly growth on record, CNBC reported, as Alibaba and Tencent posted flat or sales decline in the second quarter. As the Chinese largest computer vision tech company, SenseTime’s disappointing revenue casts a shadow over the commercialization of AI.

Trending Papers

xTrimo Multimer is a cooperation project by BioMap and HPC-AI TECH which provides a high-performance implementation of AlphaFold and AlphaFold Multimer. It accelerates the structure prediction of protein monomers and multimers by 11 times. Learn more on GitHub.

Alibaba’s new paper FederatedScope-GNN: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Package for Federated Graph Learning won the Best Paper Award at KDD 2022. In this paper, researchers discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present an implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities.

Researchers from SenseTime and Nanyang Institute of Technology introduced panoptic scene graph generation (PSG), a new problem task that requires the model to generate a more comprehensive scene graph representation based on panoptic segmentation rather than rigid bounding boxes. A high-quality PSG dataset, which contains 49k well-annotated overlapping images from COCO and Visual Genome, is created for the community to keep track of its progress. The paper Panoptic Scene Graph Generation is now on arXiv.

Rising Startups

WeRide.ai, an autonomous driving startup, is reportedly considering an initial public offering in the U.S. or Hong Kong to raise about $500 million, Bloomberg reported. Founded in 2017, the Guangzhou-based startup has accumulated more than 11 million kilometers of public road AD mileage and formed strategic partnerships with top-tier global OEMs and Tier 1 including Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, Yutong Group, GAC Group, Bosch, etc.

DeepWay, an autonomous truck startup, has raised RMB460 million ($67 million) in its Series A funding round. A joint venture company created by Baidu and Lionbridge in 2020, DeepWay unveiled its first electric heavy-duty truck that will be mass-produced in 2023.