Currently, artificial intelligence technology continues to make breakthroughs and is reshaping the global pattern of scientific and technological innovation as well as industrial and economic development with disruptive power, achieving value fission. As the core engine of new productive forces, artificial intelligence promotes a profound transformation of the digital economy from “scale expansion” to “quality leap” through technological empowerment. Under this trend, the “Expert Talk” column of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) has specially launched a series of topics on “Artificial Intelligence”, inviting a number of authoritative experts in the industry to interpret the hotspots and trends of the current artificial intelligence industry development from multiple perspectives.
In this issue, Wang Qiang, Deputy Director (in charge of work) of the Digital Economy and Artificial Intelligence Research Department of the Institute of Industry and Planning of CAICT, is invited to conduct an in-depth analysis on the enabling value of artificial intelligence to the digital economy, from the perspective of how artificial intelligence stimulates the innovation vitality of digital industrialization, industrial digitalization and data element valueization.
I. Artificial intelligence industry clusters have become an important track for regional digital industrialization
At present, the agglomeration of China’s digital industries is obvious. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has laid out and built a number of national advanced manufacturing clusters, among which artificial intelligence industry clusters have become an important engine for the development of regional digital industries.
From the perspective of industrial scale and structure, up to now, China has cultivated more than 400 national-level specialized, sophisticated, distinctive and novel “little giant” enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence, forming a complete artificial intelligence industrial system covering the basic layer, framework layer, model layer and application layer.
From the perspective of new industrial forms, large model technologies represented by DeepSeek continue to strengthen their capabilities and are accelerating their integration into new-generation intelligent terminal devices such as intelligent connected vehicles, AI mobile phones, AI computers and intelligent robots, helping to expand the volume of the core artificial intelligence industry.
From the perspective of the industrial environment, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has promoted the construction of 11 national artificial intelligence innovation and application pilot zones through collaboration between the ministry and provinces, and has set up a national artificial intelligence fund with a scale of 60 billion yuan in conjunction with the Ministry of Finance, and the industrial ecology continues to be optimized.
CAICT continues to promote research on the layout of artificial intelligence industry clusters, and carries out all-round analysis and judgment on the construction and layout of regional artificial intelligence industry clusters in terms of core element layout, industrial chain layout, regional layout and carrier layout, to help the development of regional digital industry agglomeration.
II. Artificial intelligence empowers the intelligent upgrading of small and medium-sized enterprises and has become one of the main positions of regional industrial digitalization
At present, the wave of digitalization and intellectualization in the whole industry is unstoppable. As an important part of China’s real economy, promoting the digital and intelligent transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises has become a “must-answer question” under the new situation. Although small and medium-sized enterprises have a strong willingness to embrace AI, they still face various blocking problems at the supply and demand levels in the actual AI application process, such as unclear application scenarios, insufficient technical capacity reserves, and a single mode of supply service products. To solve the “AI application anxiety” of small and medium-sized enterprises, we should fully consider their fragmented application scenario needs, accelerate the promotion of “artificial intelligence + small and medium-sized enterprises”, explore more applicable AI application scenarios, and launch more intelligent products that are “high-quality, low-cost, quick to deploy and easy to maintain”.
CAICT accelerates research on AI empowerment for small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of standard formulation for their AI application capabilities, collection of AI application cases, and compilation of blue books, so as to promote the high-quality development of small and medium-sized enterprises empowered by artificial intelligence and help accelerate the digitalization of regional industries.
III. Artificial intelligence activates the data element industry and accelerates the process of regional data element valueization
New technologies represented by artificial intelligence are accelerating the release of the value of data elements. First, the application of large models is accelerating the generation of warm data. The application of large artificial intelligence models generates massive amounts of hot data every day, some of which can be directly used to synthesize high-quality datasets, which are then fed back to other large models for training and fine-tuning, helping various industries to accelerate the production of warm data. In addition, the use of rich cold data accumulated in enterprises to train models is gradually emerging. Although it is still in its infancy, recent technological breakthroughs are encouraging enterprises to explore new scenarios for cold data in artificial intelligence applications with a more open and innovative mindset. Second, the depth of data sources for training large artificial intelligence models continues to expand. The capabilities of large artificial intelligence models continue to strengthen, enabling them to train data with broader dimensions and longer spans, which greatly lengthens the data storage cycle and makes the long-term value of data truly noticed.
Overall, artificial intelligence and data elements are closely linked and mutually reinforcing. Artificial intelligence is activating the local data element industry and accelerating the process of regional data element valueization.
IV. Conclusion
The digital economy and artificial intelligence complement each other. Artificial intelligence stimulates the innovative vitality of the digital economy, while the digital economy provides a broad scene and elements for the innovation of artificial intelligence technology and industry. Therefore, we should accelerate the promotion of “artificial intelligence +” to help the development of the digital economy achieve deeper transformative breakthroughs and innovations.
