AI to remain one of Shanghai's leading industries

Artificial intelligence will continue to be one of Shanghai's leading industries, and its market scale already exceeded 450 billion yuan ($62 billion) in 2024, according to officials.

"In the past few years, Shanghai has been beefing up policy support for innovations, promoting technological breakthroughs, strengthening the ecological layout of the AI industry chain, and actively building a world-class high-end industrial cluster," said Chen Jie, vice-mayor of Shanghai, during the opening ceremony of the 2025 Global Developer Conference on Saturday.

Themed as AI shaping the world, unlocking infinite opportunities, the conference is an AI event for global developers to communicate, collaborate and innovate. The conference is being held from Feb 21 through Feb 23 in Shanghai.

Calling developers an important driving force for the progress of artificial intelligence technology and industrial development, Xiong Jijun, vice-minister of industry and information technology, said the number of participants involving open-source in China is second worldwide.

"Thanks to the developers, AI achieved rapid development and there appeared accelerated breakthroughs in open-source large model technology and products recently, which has brought new opportunities for the development of China's artificial intelligence industry," Xiong said.

According to Chen, a series of achievements were achieved in technological innovation, industry-finance cooperation, and international cooperation under the guidance and support of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which included reaching a market scale of over 450 billion yuan last year, successfully holding the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) for seven consecutive years, and filing 60 large models.

"Amid rapid iteration and emerging of open-source AI models, Shanghai will continue to give full play of its strengths as a megacity, and accelerate the construction of an AI highland with international influence," Chen said.

"I'm really impressed with (what) Shanghai has done around AI. You have all these large corporations that are investing AI, you have the government providing incentives and support and investment to support various different AI initiatives, training, growing the developer community focusing on open source. I think Shanghai is really building itself out as a leader in this space," said Andrew Aitken, technical oversight committee member of Linux Foundation FINOS Foundation, past board member.

Aitken is among one of the industry experts feeling the industrial shock wave by DeepSeek-R1 developed by Chinese startup DeepSeek.

"I hope not just Chinese AI companies, but other global AI companies learn from what DeepSeek is doing. Start by open sourcing your software, now they can more fully open source, but they've done a really good job so far. And they've made it really financially approachable to build your own language models, so they've done that really well and the rest of the world can learn from that," said Aitken.

Indeed, an array of open-source models led by DeepSeek-R1 are presented, and as it is expected to strengthen Chinese companies' efforts to offer the world the best open-sourcing large models.

"StepFun will open-source its picture-to-video model in March," said Jiang Daxin, founder and CEO of StepFun.

According to Jiang, the Shanghai-based artificial intelligence start-up StepFun and Chinese carmaker Geely Auto Group jointly announced on Feb 18 the open-sourcing of two multimodal large models to global developers. Of the two models, one is the world's largest and highest-performing open-source video generation model, and the other is the industry's first product-grade open-source voice interaction model.

"Shanghai will further improve its AI ecosystem of open-source and openness, accelerate large-scale vertical applications of AI, continue to cultivate an inclusive and open developers' culture, optimize resources, actively incubate an ecology for active developers, and encourage more developers to devote themselves to the research, development and transformation of artificial intelligence technology, so as to inject vitality into the development of artificial intelligence," Chen said.

With a task to materialize AI applications in various scenarios and to promote the commercialization of AI, this year's conference consists of an opening ceremony, a young developers' exchange meeting, enterprise forums and developers' activities.

The conference focused on key technologies including large model, computing power, corpus, tools, and software platforms, according to the organizers.

The conference is originated from the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), which has become an influential platform for AI cooperation and exchange. The 2025 conference looks to offer fine development environment for developers in the field of artificial intelligence and related sectors, facilitate integration of various industries and resources along the AI industry, empower developers, motivate the application of AI in various scenarios, strengthen the vitality of AI and related industries, and therefore to promote artificial intelligence's development in China and the world as a whole.

The 2024 conference attracted 35,600 developers to participate offline, and about 32 million developers online, official data from the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization showed.

Li Junfeng in Shanghai contributed to this story.