China approves over 40 AI models for public use in six months

China has approved more than 40 AI models for public use over the past six months, according to a report from the country’s state-owned publication Securities Times.  

Beijing, which has passed approvals in four tranches since it set up its approval process around August last year, reportedly approved 14 AI models last week. Companies that received approvals for their models include Xiaomi, 4Paradigm, and 01.AI.

The first tranche of approvals was given to firms, including Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance. The second and third tranches were approved in November and December.

Last year, state-run research institutes in China reported that Chinese technology firms had launched 79 large language models (LLMs). The Chinese government has not revealed the actual number of approvals for AI it has given out to date.

The number assumes significance as China is embroiled in a battle of supremacy in the technology sector with the US, which has seen both nations deploy strategies that thwart each other’s progress.

The report comes at a time when the US is readying an executive order to monitor AI models being trained on cloud service providers, such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS, in order to take additional steps to address “the National Emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities.”

However, both the countries at last year’s UK AI Safety Summit signed the Bletchley Declaration, an agreement that seeks cooperation from several countries including the US and China to form a common line of thinking that would oversee the evolution of AI and ensure that the technology is advancing safely.

Just like Beijing’s approval mechanism for AI approval, US President Joe Biden in October last year issued an executive order that hammered out clear rules and oversight measures to ensure AI is kept in check, while also providing paths for it to grow.

Currently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT — the most popular generative AI — is facing several lawsuits, especially the one from The New York Times, that questions the method through which data was used for training the generative AI platform’s underlying LLMs.

The country has also seen the rise of a startup that is offering a program that certifies an AI model based on what kind of data it is trained on.