Multimodal AI

At the 2025 Sohu Tech Summit, academician Zheng Weimin highlighted AI trends, emphasizing China’s focus on multimodal large models and strategic AI deployment in GDP-critical sectors like manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. He addressed the paradox of relying on NVIDIA’s GPU ecosystem amid export restrictions and chip shortages, while domestic developers advance hardware alternatives but struggle with software fragmentation. Zheng proposed a dual strategy: creating a “pseudo-CUDA” environment to ease transitions and prioritizing hardware benchmarks despite late entry. He argued that achieving 60-80% of international performance standards, paired with localized optimization, could drive adoption in key areas like vision and speech processing, allowing China to bypass traditional tech dominance through targeted interoperability amid tightening global data policies.