(Yicai) Sept. 8 -- More than 500 entrepreneurs, experts, and scholars from around the world, including Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners, are joining the 2023 Inclusion Conference on the Bund, a fintech summit in Shanghai, and some of the most heated conversations are likely to be about artificial intelligence.

The group of participants also has nearly 20 academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Yicai learned. The event will continue till tomorrow.

One of the hottest topics this year is AI. Industrial dividends of AI, unleashed by generative AI, are only starting to take shape, experts agree. In China, at least 130 companies study large language models, and almost 80 of them focus on general-purpose LLMs.

"LLMs will bring forth a new world with all-round changes,” said Eric Jing, chairman and chief executive of Ant Group. The fintech arm of Alibaba Group Holding is expected to reveal its latest progress on developing such a ChatGPT-like model during the conference.

Companies should pay close attention to the application of new technologies to promote cooperation and development, several industry insiders said. Emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, privacy-preserving computation, and digital yuan will create greater value in the physical world, they added.

The combination of AI, blockchain, and digital yuan will bring about a more automatic, credible, and effective financial service system in the future, said Zhang Hongjiang, academician of the US National Academy of Engineering.

A collaborative network focusing on the supply chain of data should be built digitally to support industrial supply chains, according to Geoff Jiang, president of Digital Technology Business Group at Ant. However, trust is the biggest obstacle to efficient cooperation, Jiang said.

Privacy protection is difficult because LLMs offer various opportunities for privacy breaches, per He Jifeng, an academician of the CAS. "Not only AI itself, but the way humans train AI should conform to human values."

A new round of technological and industrial changes delivered by generative AI will take the world by storm in the next eight to 10 years, per Joseph Ngai, chairman of McKinsey China. The potential benefits that AI brings to the global economy will reach USD25 trillion, making it one of the most important racetracks for all enterprises. "This era has just begun."

Editor: Emmi Laine