China will develop more than 50 new national and industrial standards for artificial intelligence (AI) by 2026 to facilitate the high-quality development of the AI industry. This goal is part of guidelines on standardizing systems for the AI industry that were jointly issued by four State government agencies yesterday.
The country also aims to participate in the formation of more than 20 international AI standards by 2026 to promote the development of the global AI sector, according to the guidelines. Furthermore, China aims to have more than 1,000 companies adopt and advocate for these new standards.
The guidelines come at a time when China's AI industry is developing quickly in terms of technological innovation and breadth of applications.
With accelerated advancements in AI technologies, particularly those represented by large language models, the AI industry has shown new paths forward in technological breakthroughs and deep international collaboration. This has created an urgent need to establish meaningful industry standards, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
China will work with other countries to resolve global issues, like AI ethics, security, and privacy, and promote the construction of a fairer, more reasonable, and more effective global AI governance system, said Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.
Wang also stated that China will place more emphasis on the high-quality growth and sustainable development of AI in the future, noting that the new standards could play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI development and collaboration on an international scale.
China has attached great importance to the development of AI in recent years.
Facial recognition, voice recognition, intelligent robots, and virtual reality have been widely used in the country in fields like education, health care, science and technology, logistics, agriculture, and entertainment. Autonomous vehicle technologies are also being developed and tested rapidly.
According to a development plan for next-generation AI, China aims to become the world's foremost center of AI innovation by 2030, with the scale of its core AI industry exceeding 1 trillion yuan (US$140.9 billion) and that of related industries exceeding 10 trillion yuan.
To solve major application and industrialization problems related to AI, China has introduced policies for scientific and technological research and development, application promotion, and industrial development.
Many local governments are also accelerating the integration of innovation resources to better promote the development of AI and related industries.
Shenzhen plans to build a national pilot zone for AI innovation and a national demonstration zone for AI applications.