From the latest blockchain solutions to unmanned vehicle for on-demand retail delivery, virtual economy capabilities and cutting-edge gadgets have been showcased at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference to empower Shanghai's smart urban management transformation.

Tech giants are flexing their muscles as they point to intelligent solutions, robotics, the metaverse, autonomous driving, and blockchains with the latest tools to help more efficient operations.

Meituan's latest model of unmanned vehicle unveiled at the WAIC hopes to explore smarter delivery services and expand on-demand retail solutions for neighboring communities.

Zhang Ying, deputy director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization, said the deployment of intelligent facilities and gadgets across various industries is one of Shanghai's top priorities.

The unmanned aerial operation demonstration zone in Jinshan District is the latest effort to leverage development in the AI and and empower various industry segments.

Shanghai is one of the first cities to grant a regular and commercial route for unmanned vehicle delivery of food and drugs.

Since Meituan first unveiled the drone at the WAIC two years ago, it has completed over 170,000 orders over the country.

Local partnership by tech giants have also seen fruitful results.

The Ant Blockchain Industry Innovation Alliance which was unveiled last September in the Jing'an District has since attracted over a dozen startups by offering industry specific blockchain solutions in areas such as gaming and food tracing.

Located in the Shibei Hi-Tech Park, it covers 3800 square meters and aims to build up an ecosystem to link industry partners and digital solution providers.

Local digital service provider Magic Oranges Network Co Ltd is one of the blockchain solution providers to leverage the ecosystem and Ant's platform technologies. AntChain's OpenLab blockchain protocol have helped several members of the alliance to build industry specific applications.

Ant's digital copyright service platform is also shortlisted for the top 30 "SAIL" (Super AI Leader) award at this year's expo.

The Digital persona-generating model by Tencent Cloud is one of the interactive models at the exhibition that is attracting large crowds.

The interface uses about three minutes' of a person's visual clips and 100 spoken sentences to reproduce a digital replica that replicates the person's voice and image.

XMusic is Tencent's new generative music writing framework to compose music based on prompts such as snippets of melody that are whistled or hummed, as well as pictures, tags, or simple phrases.

Tencent Cloud earlier this week unveiled a vector database product for large language models (LLMs) training needs, containing a structured collection of vectors, where each vector represents a data point or an entity.

Tencent's senior executive vice president and chief executive of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group Dawson Tang said that generic large language models might not be suitable for offering industry specific solutions for different kinds of businesses.

Industry specific solutions need to take into account targeted capabilities, data security, continuous iteration and comprehensive cost.