上海的这场 AI 盛会：机器人、开源，与一场刚刚开始的全球竞赛

Today I want to talk with you about a major event in the tech world: the four-day World AI Conference just came to a close in Shanghai.

This conference, known as WAIC, is currently one of the largest and most significant AI gatherings in the world.

And this year's edition broke records on almost every dimension.

Let me start with a few numbers to give you a vivid impression.

This year, over 1,400 heavyweight guests came from around the world, and more than 1,100 companies exhibited.

Over 3,000 innovations were on display, including more than 100 chips and over 260 large AI models.

But the real show-stealers were the more than 200 robots that had "come alive."

Their appearance grows ever closer to real humans — they can walk, converse, and even do work.

More importantly, these robots are long past being mere samples for people to admire.

A good portion are built for real-world settings — guiding guests, delivering items, and answering questions in hotels, malls, and showrooms.

You could also see self-driving cars, systems that help doctors read medical images, and robotic arms swinging tirelessly on factory floors.

And this points precisely to the deepest shift at this year's conference.

In past years, this industry competed over whose model had more parameters and was smarter — an arms race centered on single-point technological breakthroughs.

But this year, the wind has clearly shifted.

People are no longer fixated on the models themselves, but care more about one thing: whether AI can truly be put into practice — whether it can help companies make money, boost industry efficiency, and improve ordinary people's lives.

Put bluntly, it's a shift from "showing off models" to "competing on applications" — from the lab out into the real world.

If technology is the skeleton of this conference, then the political and global significance it carries is its other major highlight.

This year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony and delivered a speech.

He defined artificial intelligence as a rare, historic opportunity of our era.

He called on all nations to seize this opportunity together and deepen cooperation, rather than setting limits on one another and each fighting its own battle.

In his speech, he placed particular emphasis on the idea of "open source."

Open source means making core technology public, so the whole world can use it for free and improve it together — rather than it being tightly held by a handful of giants.

He said China is willing to extend a hand to developing countries, helping them build their own AI capabilities, so that no nation falls behind in this wave of technology.

His intent is not hard to read: China is trying to play the role of a "leader" in the global AI landscape.

And behind this, of course, lies the unspoken tug-of-war between China and the United States.

In recent years, China and the US have chased each other down the AI track, contesting nearly every inch, from chips to models.

Besides Xi Jinping, many other heavyweight figures attended this year's conference — even the UN Secretary-General showed up in person.

This itself shows that artificial intelligence has long transcended the realm of pure technology.

It deeply affects the economy, industry, national competition, and even the future world order.

In the end, this conference made two clear threads plain to us.

The first: AI is seeping into every one of our daily lives at an astonishing speed.

The second: the global race around AI has only just raised its curtain.

For us caught up in it, rather than growing anxious, we're better off understanding it and using it well.

After all, the future is already here — and its name is artificial intelligence.

OK, that's all for today — see you next time.