(Yicai) July 21 -- The most milestone-worthy moment at this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai was 29 countries singing the Agreement on the Establishment of the World AI Cooperation Organization, marking the launch of the first intergovernmental international organization dedicated to AI.

The agreement sets out the core priorities of treating international alliance on AI capacity-building as a priority, improving access to AI technologies and services so that developing countries share equally in the gains from this new wave of intelligence, and building on dialogue, policy consensus, and the sharing of best practices, serving as a genuine platform for matching supply with demand. 

It calls for deeper integration of countries' complementary strengths, for advancing "AI Plus" initiatives suited to national conditions, for stronger cooperation in science, technology, and industry, for jointly building open-source ecosystems, and for delivering a batch of practical, grounded cooperation outcomes.

The core purpose of the agreement is to break down global barriers to intelligent tech and address the imbalance in AI development. It should help answer the questions posed at the WAIC by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who, after hearing China's briefing on AI applications in industrial production, asked if the country's AI tech can cut energy consumption, raise production efficiency, and generate real economic benefits.

Developing countries have widely struggled with the challenges of smart transformation. Local industries want to use AI to upgrade, but lack the long-accumulated industrial data, mature models suited to real-world production, and clear pathways for deploying AI models, so integrating the digital economy with traditional industry has been difficult to advance.

Mainstream overseas AI solutions tend to emphasize parameter counts, concepts, and high-end use cases, coming with high costs and demanding adaptation requirements, while mainly being suited to the highly mature, standardized industrial systems of developed countries. They struggle to fit the on-the-ground realities of most developing countries, including volatile processes, aging equipment, limited capital, and a shortage of skilled talent, quietly widening the global gap in industrial digitalization.

But at this year's WAIC, China's AI, particularly in industrial production, has shown that it is fully capable of going global at scale, in a standardized and replicable way. The country's industrial AI has been forged within the world's most complete, largest, and most diverse manufacturing system, refined over years of round-the-clock work on production lines through massive volumes of complex operating conditions and tens of millions of data points from production.

With a channel for multilateral cooperation formally opening, it offers domestic industrial AI companies a structured, sustainable vehicle for going global. China's industrial AI, already equipped with mature capabilities for global expansion, represents the most practical and effective path to narrowing the international digital divide.

The author of this article is Li Jinjin, director of the AI and Microstructure Laboratory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and founder of Jincheng Technology.

Editor: Martin Kadiev