In 2018, the financing amount of China's AI enterprises was 383.222 billion yuan, ranking first in the world. The industry has shown good growth in terms of financing amount and application.
Recently, the China new generation AI Development Strategy Research Institute released the 'China new generation AI technology industry development report (2019)'. According to the report, in 2018, 577 of China's 745 AI enterprises had financing events, with a total financing of 383.222 billion yuan, 2.04 times that of 2017, ranking first in the world.
'Although the number of Chinese AI enterprises has declined since 2016, Chinese AI enterprises have shown good growth in terms of financing amount and expansion of application fields.' Liu Gang, chief economist of China new generation AI Development Strategy Research Institute, said.
It is understood that as of February 28 this year, the report has detected 745 domestic AI enterprises, accounting for about 21.67% of the total number of AI enterprises in the world. Chinese AI enterprises are mainly distributed in Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai and Zhejiang, accounting for 43.2%, 16.9%, 14.9% and 8.3% respectively.
'Among the 745 Chinese AI enterprises, application tier enterprises account for 75.2% and are distributed in 18 application fields, including intelligent manufacturing, science and technology finance, digital content and new media, new retail and intelligent security. The integrated development of AI and traditional industries is becoming an important driving force for China's economic transformation and upgrading.' Liu Gang said.
According to the report, from the perspective of the core technology distribution of AI enterprises in China, big data and cloud computing account for the highest proportion, reaching 21.3%; The second is machine learning and recommendation, speech recognition and natural language processing, face and gait and expression recognition, accounting for 17.2%, 9.4% and 8.6% respectively. Among the 113 AI enterprises that can obtain R & D intensity data, the average R & D intensity is 9.14%, much higher than the average R & D intensity of domestic enterprises in 2018.
The report points out that all regions have promoted the collaborative innovation and development of AI technology industry by establishing AI industry alliances. By the end of 2018, the report had detected 117 industrial alliances in the field of artificial intelligence, of which 34 were newly created in 2018, accounting for 29%. The 34 newly established industrial alliances are widely distributed in 14 provinces and cities, of which Beijing and Shanghai have the largest number, both of which are 5.
However, while the AI industry has achieved rapid development, it has also exposed many problems. There is still a large gap between China and developed countries in the field of basic research of AI. 'For example, the existence of data islands is still a key factor restricting the development of AI technology industry. Whether in the development of science and technology finance, intelligent medicine or manufacturing, the formation of data openness and data ecological advantages are the premise and foundation for the development of AI.' Liu Gang said that the key to the sustainable development of AI technology industry in the future is how to promote the research and development of AI core technology, the further opening of application scenarios, the improvement of data ecological advantages, the innovation of technology platform system, the benign interaction between core industry departments and integrated industry departments, and the formation of efficient talent training mechanism.