China’s top economic authorities have pledged to establish a state-backed fund to boost technical innovation, following the worldwide success of DeepSeek’s most recent artificial intelligence reasoning model.
Zheng Shanjie, the head of China’s state economic planner, told reporters Thursday on the sidelines of the country’s rubber-stamp national legislature and advisory body’s annual meetings that the “state venture capital guidance fund” will concentrate on cutting-edge areas like artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and hydrogen energy storage.
Zheng, the chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, noted that the fund is anticipated to draw in close to 1 trillion yuan ($138 billion) in money over the course of 20 years from both the private sector and local governments.
Chinese policymakers believe that advanced chips, robots, AI, and quantum computing are essential for boosting economic expansion and modernising manufacturing.
However, US tech limitations are putting increasing pressure on China.
Credit: The Verge
At the press conference, Zheng adopted a belligerent stance, praising China’s quick advancements in industrial and humanoid robots, huge language models for artificial intelligence, and microchips.
“Scenarios that were once limited to science fiction are now coming to pass. We are making steady progress towards the cutting edge of innovation and technology worldwide,” Zheng stated.
He said, seemingly referring to the US, “This proves that the suppression and blockade attempt by certain forces only serve to accelerate our drive for independent innovation.”
The privately held business DeepSeek, whose R1 large language model caused a stir in the world’s stock markets when it was unveiled in January, was able to almost equal the capabilities of its competitors, such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Meta’s Llama, but at a significantly lower price.
Given that the US has spent years trying to limit China’s access to high-power AI chips due to national security concerns, this startled many. That indicates that DeepSeek allegedly used comparatively underpowered AI chips to achieve its low-cost approach.
Premier Li Qiang of China made a commitment to “promote emerging industries and industries of the future” during his presentation of the government’s annual work report on Wednesday.
Li pledged to set up a system to boost financing for sectors like 6G technology, embodied AI, quantum technology, and bio-manufacturing.
