By Keqiao Cheng, EDITOR

The Smart China Expo opening ceremony was held on August 23 in Chongqing, China. More than 500 exhibitors from 28 countries and regions have participated in this grand event.

China’s three tech giants, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, known as BAT, spoke at the opening ceremony.

 

Ma Huateng (Pony Ma): Tencent will set the headquarters of Southwest China in Chongqing.

Ma said that Tencent will cooperate with Changan Automobile, which is a large vehicle manufacturer based in Chongqing, particularly in the field of Internet of Vehicles. News techs of Tencent, such as Internet of Things (IoT), AI, will be applied.

Another crucial news is that Tencent has announced it will build a supercomputing center in Chongqing, in cooperation with the government.

Furthermore, Tencent will start a close cooperation with this huge metropolis of Southwest China.

Tencent will work with Chongqing Transport Group to build a smart traffic system, reducing the traffic cost and increasing the traffic efficiency.

In tourism, Tencent will help the government of Wulong District of Chongqing with a solution on smart tourism.

Recently, Tencent also helped the police of Chongqing to arrest more than 300 criminals by using Big Data.

To close the speech, Ma Huateng announced that Tencent will set the headquarters of Southwest China in Chongqing.

 

Ma Yun (Jack Ma): I don’t know much about technology, but I respect it.

Alibaba’s Ma Yun spoke that it is necessary to focus on the smart manufacturing. He believes that the engine of future manufacturing is not manufacturing itself, but modern service industry.

Ma also pointed out the importance of smart technology. He thinks the new manufacturing is the new engine of the economic transformation, and the intelligent technology is the key to future manufacturing.

Ma Yun ended his speech by saying it is not intelligence that leads to the future, but the wisdom of the people behind it.

 

Li Yanhong (Robin Li): A lot of artificial intelligence is fake.

Baidu’s Li Yanhong talked about the misconceptions of artificial intelligence. "there is no need to strive for artificial intelligence to resemble more human beings." He stressed, "we don’t have to let the machine learn to walk, hop, and step up the stairs, but we must make the machines think in the way we human beings think."

In English, the word “artificial” can refer to something which is fake. In fact, a lot of so-called “artificial intelligence” is actually fake, said Li.

Li explained it with an interesting example.

“If you ask a smart speaker who is handsome, it will respond that you are handsome. This answer has been settled, but the speaker doesn’t really get your idea. So, if you ask it how the Tang Dynasty ended, it cannot respond.”

When talking about the opinion that the AI will destroy the world, Li pointed out that as so far, it is still quite difficult to make a machine really “think”. Instead of overthinking the threat of AI to us, we should worry more about how to improve the current technologies and solve the existing problems.