Billionaire techpreneurs Jack Ma and Elon Musk faced off over artificial intelligence (AI) at a much-anticipated morning session at the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference, showing they have a different vision of the future. The conference attracted executives from nearly 300 companies including U.S. firms Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm as well as scientists and scholars from across the world. Both men had to condense their visions of the future into a compact 45-minute session, which also included answering a series of pre-prepared questions from Chinese netizens.

“AI will open a new chapter so that humans will know themselves better,” said Jack Ma, Alibaba Group Holding Founder. “Most of the projections about AI are wrong, people who are street-smart about AI are not scared by it. Due to AI, people will have more time to enjoy themselves as human beings. Forget long days, we could end up with 12-hour work weeks,” said Ma. “I don’t worry too much about the impact of AI on jobs, in the future we will not need a lot of jobs.”

Elon Musk, who has founded a string of tech ventures including SpaceX, Boring Co and Neuralink, aside from his role as Co-founder and CEO of Tesla, said he had heard that “AI sounds like love in Chinese”, but in a more cautious tone described AI as “much more than just a smart human”. “Humans may become too slow. A millisecond is an eternity to a computer today,” said Musk. “Computers are already smarter than human beings in many aspects,” he said, adding that while humans write AI software today, in the end the machine will do this itself.

Ma is mainly an optimist, seeing AI as an inevitable agent of change in a digital world, whereas Musk has sounded several warnings. In 2017, Musk urged the United Nations to take action against the dangers of autonomous weapons, known as “killer robots”. He has also described AI as humanity’s “biggest existential threat”, comparing it to “summoning the demon”. Amid the escalating trade and technology war between the U.S. and China, Jack Ma said both countries needed to make a concerted effort to work together on technology for the world to benefit from the digital era, the South China Morning Post reports.

During his China-trip, Elon Musk visited Tesla’s USD5 billion production facility in Lingang, part of Shanghai’s free-trade zone (FTZ), and launched the China unit of his infrastructure start-up Boring. Musk said that the Shanghai factory was progressing at a fast speed and that he was satisfied with the work done by Tesla’s China team. He added that “it’s a good story for the world to see how much progress you can make in China. I really think China’s future looks very impressive.”

The second edition of the Smart China Expo was also held in Chongqing, attracting over 1,800 participants and 843 companies from 28 countries and regions, including 13 Nobel Prize laureates, four Turing Award winners, Fortune 500 business leaders and tech companies including Intel, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi. “Smart technology is developing very fast in China,” Vice Premier Liu He said at the opening ceremony. “It has become a new, important economic growth point, with preliminary statistics showing that the total industrial scale of AI-related industries in China surpassed CNY500 billion in 2018.” Chongqing, on the upper reaches of the Yangtze river, has established one of the world’s largest IT industrial clusters and one of China’s biggest auto manufacturing bases. In 2018, the city poured over CNY7 billion into smart manufacturing upgrades.

China has named Huawei Technologies and Hikvision Digital Technology as new national champions in artificial intelligence (AI). Huawei will take the lead in the research on AI infrastructure and software. Surveillance systems firm Hikvision will cover initiatives related to video perception. The other new national AI champions introduced at the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference include Hong Kong-listed smartphone vendor Xiaomi Corp, which will focus on smart home ware; e-commerce company JD.com, on smart supply chain; and internet security company Qihoo 360 Technology, handling online safety. Facial recognition start-ups Megvii and Yitu were tasked to cover the areas of image perception and image computing, respectively. China now has a total of 15 national AI champions since it started this initiative in 2017.
These include Baidu for autonomous driving, Alibaba Group Holding for smart city initiatives, Tencent Holdings for computer vision in medical diagnosis and iFlyTek for speech recognition. SenseTime was added last year, with its focus on intelligent vision.