Global Developer Conference highlights open-source AI models

China

Global Developer Conference highlights open-source AI models

2025-02-23 17:38 Last Updated At：20:17

The ongoing 2025 Global Developer Conference in Shanghai highlights the rising trend of promoting open-source models in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, which is less costly than closed-source models and is poised to attract massive users by providing free services.

The developer conference, which opened on Friday and will run through Sunday, has brought together more than 100 developer communities from around the world to discuss promoting AI application, with attending enterprises debuting multiple open-source large language models (LLM).

Open-source AI models are more flexible, transparent and cost-efficient compared with their closed-source counterparts. According to the conference, China has been making accelerated breakthroughs in developing open-source AI model technologies and products, which helps bring opportunities to the country's AI industry.

"Within just 24 hours, creators around the world made a great number of AI-generated videos. More and more partners have joined our open-source ecosystem," said Jiang Daxin, an exhibitor.

High-level open-source large models can help accelerate development of the AI industry and give the public free access to the capability of exceptional large models. Many AI exhibitors say they are expecting open-source models to bring technological advance and broaden application of AI products.

"Through open sources, we can improve the models and the applications. We can also promote wider use of AI technologies in more fields and industries," said Jia Anya, another exhibitor.

Shanghai, as the host city of the AI conference, has been nurturing a fertile business environment for both domestic and international AI enterprises, innovation teams, and talents to develop. By the end of 2024, the industry scale of Shanghai's AI sector had surpassed 450 billion yuan (over 62 billion U.S. dollars).

"Shanghai will continue promoting computing power construction, and by the end of this year the city will have added 100,000 batches of new computing power to boost the development of its public computing power service platform. Shanghai has established the first AI corpus company in China. Through the corpus public service platform, we will launch a program for inclusive corpus service and promote corpus public services, in efforts to develop a series of services including corpora and corpus tools to provide more service for entrepreneurs and developers," said Pan Yan, director of the artificial intelligence department of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization.

Chinese, British companies see great potential for cooperation in various sectors

Both Chinese and British companies expect to deepen economic and trade cooperation across sectors, following British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's call for stronger dialogue and deeper engagement between businesses and institutions in the UK and China at the opening ceremony of the UK-China Business Forum in Beijing.

Starmer pointed to what he described as "real progress" during his visit to China from Wednesday to Saturday, citing China's decision to cut tariffs on Scotch whisky. He also urged guests to strengthen exchanges and turn dialogue into practical cooperation.

The forum was co-organized by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and the British government. It brought together more than 300 guests, including over 60 business and cultural delegates across different sectors accompanying the UK Prime Minister. Healthcare and pharmaceuticals were among the key focuses.

According to Wang Xingli, co-president of Fosun Pharma, China-UK cooperation in healthcare is moving beyond market access, toward cooperation across research, clinical development and manufacturing.

"With their science, our productivity, our technology know-how, as well as AI capabilities, I think we can produce big blockbuster drug together," said Wang.

Financial cooperation also featured prominently.

As a long-established global financial center, the UK plays a key role in international banking and capital markets, while China is expanding its cross-border financial services to support trade and investment with the world.

"We've already seen that London has become the biggest hub for RMB clearing offshore from China. The volumes today are tremendous, about 350 billion RMB's worth of trading and clearing that's going on through London," said Tim Skeet, chief institutional relationship officer at the London Branch of the Bank of China.

"All the major Chinese banks are represented in London, and similarly, most of the UK banks have a presence in China. So there's that cooperation between the two centers is very important for the mutuality of interest that we share in terms of the financing of trade, the financing of investment," said Brendan Nelson, group chairman of HSBC.