China has given the green light to more than 40 AI models for public use in the last six months, as per a report from the country’s state-owned publication Securities Times.
Beijing has approved 14 AI models in the last week, bringing the total number of approvals to over 40. Companies such as Xiaomi, 4Paradigm, and 01.AI have received the go-ahead for their models.
Chinese technology firms launched 79 large language models (LLMs) last year, but the actual number of AI approvals by the Chinese government remains undisclosed.
China’s move to approve AI models is significant as it competes with the US in the technology sector. Both countries have been deploying strategies to outdo each other.
Meanwhile, the US is preparing an executive order to monitor AI models trained on cloud service providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. This is part of the effort to address “the National Emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities.”
Despite the competition, the US and China signed the Bletchley Declaration at last year’s UK AI Safety Summit, aiming to form a common line of thinking to oversee the evolution of AI.
Just like Beijing’s AI approval mechanism, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order last year to ensure AI is kept in check while providing paths for it to grow.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI, is facing lawsuits, including one from The New York Times, questioning the method used for training the generative AI platform’s underlying LLMs.
China has also seen the rise of a startup offering a program that certifies an AI model based on the data it is trained on.