That made me wonder — how long before China develops its own Sora? And, will AI become China's critical new productive force? According to OpenAI's explainer, Sora is capable of generating complex scenes with a very high degree of accuracy, including multiple characters, specific types of movements, themes and backgrounds. It understands not only what the user requests in the prompts, but also how these things exist in the physical world. On Feb 16, Zhou Hongyi, founder of cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology, said Sora may bring a huge disruption to the advertising industry, movie trailers and the short-video industry; what's more, the realization of generative AI may be shortened from 10 years to one or two years.
According to a report by the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, China had developed at least 254 AI large language models by October last year. Currently, most domestic large models still have a huge gap with GPT-4.0. But the country could leverage such frontier AI technologies in more industry-specific scenarios. Or, to put it simply, China needs to apply such technologies to real use, to develop them into productive forces and narrow the gap between itself and the US.
Jia Jiaya, founder of smart manufacturing company SmartMore, told me that GPT-4.0 is less efficient in the industrial sector and that's where Chinese companies found opportunities. His company developed industry GPT, one of the first in the industrial sector, which aims to leverage the LLM to drive the efficiency of industrial sectors.