China’s biggest AI conference kicks off this week with Qualcomm as the sole US sponsor amid escalating tech rivalry

Chinese tech giants, including sanctions-hit Huawei and SenseTime, are the main attraction at the three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla will all be at the conference, but the number of US sponsors has declined since 2019

Artificial intelligence

Tracy Quin Shanghai

Published: 9:32pm, 3 Jul 2023

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China kicks off its annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai this week in a showcase of Beijing’s AI ambitions amid a deepening technological rivalry with the US.

The annual event, which is hosted by several government ministries, has attracted China’s top AI firms and institutions. The published agenda that runs from Thursday to Saturday is dominated by local firms and speakers, with some big international names conspicuously missing. Most notably, Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, will not be in attendance.

With domestic regulators flagging risks about generative AI, ChatGPT and similar services such as Google’s Bard are unlikely to be allowed into the Chinese market, making AI another closed garden inside the Great Firewall that could benefit local tech giants.

According to the Shanghai government, the event has attracted more than 400 enterprises, at least 30 of which are developers of their own large language models (LLMs), the tech that drives products like ChatGPT.

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Several Big Tech firms are among the event’s 10 “strategic partners”, or main sponsors. Alibaba Group Holding, its fintech affiliate Ant Group and Tencent Holdings are all on the list. Huawei Technologies and SenseTime, both sanctioned by the US, are sponsoring the conference as well. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The other partners on the list are the Bank of Communications, investment firm Citic Group, state-owned telecoms operators China Telecom and China Mobile, and Transwarp, a big-data infrastructure software developer.

Mobile chip design giant Qualcomm, while not a strategic partner, is the only US company sponsoring the event as one of 22 “elite partners”. This is a noticeable shift from before the Covid-19 pandemic. At the 2019 conference, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services were all strategic partners, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk was one of the most high-profile speakers.

Semiconductor companies have publicly fretted about Washington’s escalating restrictions on chip exports to China, but trepidation about sponsoring a Chinese AI conference suggests American firms are treading cautiously around what has become a geopolitical minefield.

Washington is reportedly weighing additional restrictions on chips used to train AI, cutting off access to a modified Nvidia chip the company has been marketing to China after rules introduced last year restricted exports of its most advanced chips.

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While avoiding sponsorships, some US Big Tech firms are still showing up. Delegates from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla will all be there, the organiser said. They will discuss topics including LLMs, semiconductors, scientific intelligence, robotics, the metaverse, autonomous driving and blockchain.

The WAIC has been held annually in Shanghai since 2018, where tech firms have had the opportunity to mingle with Chinese officials. Former vice-premier Liu He was the opening speaker at the inaugural event five years ago.

The conference lists eight government departments as cosponsors: the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, State Cyberspace Administration of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, and China Association for Science and Technology.

Amid a renewed AI arms race kick-started by the introduction of ChatGPT last November, Shanghai has sought to become central to China’s goals for the industry with an ambitious plan to attract tens of thousands of technology workers.

During the annual two-day Global AI Developer Conference in February, Shanghai officials renewed their pledge to attract 20,000 to 30,000 workers and 500 related enterprises in AI by 2025.