China has entered the first echelon around the world in artificial intelligence (AI) development, according to People’s Daily Overseas Edition on Feb. 22.

China’s AI sees rapid development in recent years. The number of AI enterprises in China has reached 592 by June 30, 2017, ranking the second in the world following the U.S.

Recently, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL) entered into cooperation with Chinese Internet giant Alibaba to apply the latter’s AI technology to the former’s traffic control, city planning and environmental protection. It is only an epitome of China’s AI technology’s going global.

China has made lots of breakthroughs in AI regarding technology research and development and industrial application, said Tao Jianhua, deputy director of National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation under Chinese Academy of Sciences.

For example, deep learning network developed by Chinese Internet giant Baidu can achieve an accuracy of 99.84 percent in facial recognition.

Tencent YouTu Lab, an AI research lab under Tencent focusing on machine learning, has set a record by achieving an 83.29 percent recognition rate in the MegaFace challenge, an internationally recognized test known for its high level of difficulty.

Rapid development of AI in China also boosts development of various AI products, including smart home, intelligent vehicles, wearable devices and intelligent robots.

In addition, according to development plan issued by the State Council, the industry scale of AI in China will exceed 1 trillion yuan by 2030, and to reach this goal, the key lies in the talent team construction, Tao pointed out.

Statistics show that there are about 1.9 million technical professionals working on AI in the world by March 2017, with 850,000 in the U.S. and only 50,000 in China, respectively.

Experts predict that 5 million AI talents will be needed in China in the next few years. Tao, therefore, suggests that China spare no effort to strengthen its talent construction in AI.