(Yicai) July 5 -- Shanghai reinforced its commitment to the development and application of artificial intelligence technologies while at the same time ensuring adequate controls at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance which kicked off in the megacity yesterday.

Shanghai released its Declaration on Global AI Governance at the conference. It underscores the need to promote AI technologies while at the same time ensuring AI safety, developing an AI governance mechanism, strengthening public participation and improving literacy.

The Shanghai Declaration puts the development of the AI industry before security, which is rare among existing AI initiatives, Lu Chuanying, secretary general of the Cyberspace International Governance Research Center of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told Yicai.

AI Hub

AI is one of the three main industries which the city has targeted to develop. Shanghai has already formed a complete AI industry chain from software models to intelligent terminals and from basic research to innovative application.

The country’s first large language model innovation ecological community, the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center, was set up in the city and has attracted more than 80 LLM developers. Thirty-four LLMs have been registered and applied in vertical fields such as manufacturing, finance and intelligent robots.

The city was also selected as the location for the country’s National Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, established at the end of May, because of its strong foundation in leading industries such as industrial robots, artificial intelligence and new energy vehicles, Xu Bin, general manager of the center, told Yicai.

The center unveiled China’s first full-size open-source general-purpose humanoid robot Qinglong at WAIC yesterday.

There were 348 AI firms whose annual revenue exceeded CNY20 million (USD 2.7 million) in Shanghai last year, almost double that in 2018. The municipality’s AI market nearly tripled to CNY380 billion (USD52.2 billion) over the period, ranking top in the country. And around a third of the country’s AI professionals are in Shanghai at about 250,000 people.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor