(Yicai Global) July 9 -- Shanghai AI Laboratory released an open-source platform system called OpenXLab at the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which kicked off in Shanghai yesterday.

It includes the world's first decision-making AI platform covering a wide range of academic and industrial needs and aims to reduce repetitive investment as well as research and development costs. 

Decision-making AI is necessary to realize general-purpose AI, said Dr. Liu Yu, a scientist working at the lab. Shanghai AI Laboratory has built an AI ecosystem, including advanced decision-making systems for autonomous driving and automated machine learning, Liu added. 

“OpenXLab is dedicated to solving complex industrial problems that are hard to standardize,” Liu said. “We believe open source is not limited to code, and also hope to build an open-source ecology of knowledge sharing, organize a series of related academic activities, establish an open-source community, and cultivate more technical talent.”

OpenXLab includes OpenMMLab, a vision algorithm platform that opened last year. The platform has been improved continuously, according to Dr. Chen Kai, another scientist at the lab.

One of its code repositories, MMOCR, supports text detection, recognition and key information extraction, Chen said, adding that it can detect and recognize text content in images, a key step for AI to evolve toward recognition from perception.

The lab, officially inaugurated at the 2020 WAIC held last July, is headed by Tang Xiaoou, founder of Chinese AI unicorn SenseTime. 

Editors: Dou Shicong, Tom Litting