The General Office of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government recently unveiled the ‘15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Strategic Emerging Industries in Shanghai.’ This plan explicitly outlines the vision to construct a ‘Chip-Model-Cloud’ ecosystem. To realize this ambitious goal, Shanghai is set to develop a full-stack technology testing and verification platform, create a unified middleware software stack, and establish a general AI-driven platform for scientific research, along with AI evaluation infrastructure.

The plan zeroes in on four pivotal areas:

Firstly, large models and intelligent agents. It emphasizes driving continuous advancements in large models, particularly in areas like ultra-long context and native multimodality. The plan also tackles challenges in high-quality corpus processing and synthesis technologies, laying the groundwork for general intelligent agents. Furthermore, it aims to deepen applications in sectors such as government services and professional services, while nurturing teams of cutting-edge deployment engineers.

Secondly, AI for Science. The plan envisions constructing interdisciplinary, multimodal knowledge-reasoning scientific models. These models are designed to expedite the scientific discovery process across various disciplines, including life sciences, materials science, and physics.

Thirdly, embodied AI. The focus here is on developing core algorithms for long-term planning and dexterous manipulation. Additionally, the plan calls for building world models and physical AI algorithm systems that exhibit high causality and are aligned with physical laws. The creation of virtual-real integrated embodied training environments is also a key objective.

Fourthly, the intelligent computing industry system. The plan aims to overcome technological hurdles such as optoelectronic hybrid communication and memory-compute co-optimization (opting for the more precise industry term ‘memory-compute co-optimization’ here for clarity). It also envisions establishing a cloud-AI integrated token cloud service industry system, further solidifying Shanghai’s position as a leader in the intelligent computing landscape.