China's strategic planning in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector has helped place the country at the forefront of the global AI boom, said an industry professional.
The rapidly evolving industry has been full of pleasant surprises in recent weeks, particularly with the rise of Deepseek R1, a Chinese model that rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT but at a fraction of the training cost.
Meanwhile, the AI Action Summit is currently underway in Paris, France, from Monday to Tuesday, bringing together representatives from nearly 100 countries along with over a thousand stakeholders from the private sector and civil society to discuss global AI governance and other key topics.
In an exclusive interview with China Global Television (CGTN) on Monday via video link, André Quemé, founder and CEO of Latam China Tech, a company promoting cross-border sci-tech cooperation, discussed China's role in the ongoing global AI boom, highlighting that the success of China's latest AI models is the result of combined efforts between government and businesses.
"I believe that we see now a global frenzy about artificial intelligence (AI) and very much actually comes from what China has been producing, developing. We see people actually crazy about the work of Deepseek R1, the new model, but China has been producing a lot of research in the topic of AI. This happens not only because of the work of an individual entrepreneur or of a genius tech leader or maybe of an engineer, but this is the next structure that was (made) ready by the country, that was well-planned by the country to actually develop those industries. So we see for example, we have the intelligence development plan of 2017," the CEO said, referring to the Chinese government's AI development plan which aims to make China a global leader in AI innovation and applications by 2030.
Though a media frenzy has centered around Deepseek's success, Quemé pointed out that its new model is not alone among China's emerging AI competitors.
"There's actually a lot of work being done -- Baidu with Ernie, we see Alibaba with Qwen. This is a result of efforts from the country to actually develop this industry," he said.
The industry expert stressed that AI's growing capabilities are increasingly posing implications for society at large, calling for efforts to shape its impact.
"AI is impacting now nowadays several industries we can see like manufacturing and logistics, finance, but also the daily business operations of several different types of organizations. I think this is important to be very well aware. It not something for now. It's not just a trend. It is actually a need for many societies, actually, to be working, to having AI as a tool. You can use AI to guide you to research. You can use AI in daily life nowadays," Quemé said.
"In the future, actually, AI will be more pre-eminent, making automatic decisions. So it's very important to have a very well-built, ethical, but also a localized model in existing intelligence planned, to actually think about the development of the country and of the society," he added.
China's AI planning pays off as industry booms: industry professional
