WAIC closes with milestone project signings
The WAIC exhibition proves popular.
The three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2023, or WAIC 2023, was an outstanding success with milestone investment, booming procurement values and record visitor and online traffic, city officials said in Shanghai on Saturday.
In total, 32 milestone AI projects were signed at the closing ceremony, with a combined investment of 28.8 billion yuan (US$4 billion). The projects covered AI computing power, algorithms and device sectors.
In total 210 firms connected at WAIC, reaching the intended purchase amount of 11 billion yuan, according to Wu Jincheng, director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization.
A number of milestone AI projects are signed at WAIC on Saturday.
"WAIC demonstrates Shanghai's firm determination to actively seize the opportunities of general artificial intelligence, promote the construction of world-class industrial clusters, and build a 'Shanghai Highland' of AI development," Wu said during the closing ceremony on Saturday.
Shanghai also revealed policies to support AI large language models, or LLMs, with improved business environments, covering talented personnel, computing power and ecosystem, according to the commission.
More than 1,400 speakers and invited guests attended 133 forums of WAIC, including five Turing Award winners and one Nobel Laureate, as well as 50 senior business executives from Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Huawei and Alibaba.
A father explains features of a robotic hand to his son.
Up to 3pm on Saturday, 177,000 people had visited WAIC offline venues including forums and exhibitions. The WAIC topic has attracted 1.07 billion views, a 68 percent increase from last year.
Despite it being a rainy Saturday morning, people crowded at the front of the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center, the main WAIC exhibition venue, waiting to enter, Shanghai Daily found.
The total WAIC exhibition space was 50,000 square meters with more than 400 exhibitors, both hitting record-highs since WAIC's debut in Shanghai in 2018.
As spotlights of WAIC, more than 30 LLMs and over 20 robots were displayed. LLM is trendy as it's used in popular apps like ChatGPT.
Several global IT leaders, including AMD's chairwoman and CEO Lisa Su, gave speeches online at the closing ceremony.
