(Yicai Global) June 29 -- The three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference gearing up to open in Shanghai next week will be dominated by the advent of large language models

Focused on new technologies and applications such as LLMs, intelligent computing, and robots, this year’s WAIC will highlight the opportunities for industrial and technological change, Wu Jincheng, director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, said at a press conference today.

Starting on July 6, the WAIC will feature more than 30 LLMs from all over the world and four Turing Award winners, including David Patterson, along with Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Wu added.

The conference will showcase not only general LLMs such as Huawei’s Pangu, Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen, Baidu’s Earnie Bot, and Fudan University’s Moss, but also SenseTime’s chatbot and Tencent’s music model, said Chen Xiaohong, chairman of DLG Exhibitions and Events, which is in charge of the conference’s preparation.

The WAIC will also highlight other hot topics such as brain-computer interface and AI-assisted drug research and development. It has invited many famous universities and authoritative institutions to share their tech trend thoughts and experiences. 

This year’s conference figures will set new records, according to Wu. More than 80 Chinese and foreign academicians, and more than 1,400 guests, including 50 executives and talents from Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Huawei, and Alibaba, will attend. In addition, in excess of 400 enterprises will exhibit their products over a 50,000 square meter area.

More than 10 semiconductor companies will display their products, including some LLM chips, Chen added. The WAIC will display over twenty robots, including  Dataa Robotics’s bipedal robot with advancd conversational abilities, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus Prime, Shanghai Jiaotong University's Xiao Bei 4.0 , as well as minimally invasive surgical robots and Meituan's unmanned drone V4.

The previous five WAICs attracted more than 600,000 visitors in person and 1.5 billion online. Over 200 major industrial projects with a total investment of CNY70 billion (USD9.6 billion) were signed at previous events. Moreover, 58 major application scenarios were unveiled, and more than 300 products were launched in the domestic and foreign markets.

Editor: Futura Costaglione