How can Shanghai build a “highland” in the trend of AI?

Since its establishment more than a year ago, the Mode Space has become a business card representing the development trend of AI in China. Under the promotion of Shanghai in driving the iteration of large model technology and industrial clustering, the city has also transformed from a “Magic City” to a “Model City”.\n\nOn January 2, 2025, Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Chen Jining carried out special research on artificial intelligence enterprises in Mode Space, an innovation eco-community in徐汇区, Shanghai, to listen to their suggestions and promote the connection between enterprises and services. Chen emphasized that artificial intelligence is one of the three leading industries that Shanghai focuses on developing, which is crucial for enhancing the city’s energy level and core competitiveness, as well as for the city’s deep transformation and high-quality development. He also stressed the need to accelerate the construction of Shanghai’s AI highland and contribute more to Shanghai’s modernization.\n\nMode Space, located on the West Bank of Shanghai, has gathered 255 large model enterprises, 34 registered large models, and over 100 investment institutions in just over a year. Nearly 300 eco-activities have been launched to cultivate the industrial ecology and nurture innovative enterprises towards the goal of building a national AI highland. Here, one can clearly see a condensed supply chain of large models, including computational layers, data layers, basic large models, and application layers.\n\nThe rapid development of large model technology is reshaping various industries, and the deep integration of artificial intelligence with industries and scenarios is expected. The new trend is evident in the case of MiniMax, which launched the first MoE (Mixture of Experts) large language model “abab 6” in China in January 2024. Three months later, they further launched an upgraded version “abab 6.5”. Utilizing basic large models, MiniMax introduced “Sea螺螺AI” in May 2024, an application that acts as an AI companion to help ordinary people solve various problems. It supports free communication through text, audio, and images, and can assist in tasks such as answering questions, article writing, and video creation.\n\nMeanwhile, Modu Space is also focusing on cultivating specific vertical industries. For instance, MiDuNest, a company that focuses on government affairs verticals, has developed a government affairs large model aimed at providing knowledge management and data mining services for enterprises and governments. The company’s president and CTO Liu Yidong highlighted the unique service advantage of their model, which can be locally deployed within government intranets due to the strict data confidentiality and security requirements of government clients.\n\nModu Space is committed to building a world-class AI industry cluster and promoting the “explosion point” of industry development as a national AI highland. With the support of Shanghai and徐汇区’s computing power scheduling, open data, financial services, comprehensive services, talent services, and other all-element functional platforms, Modu Space provides “special class” and “nanny” services to solve the difficulties encountered by AI enterprises in their development process. Modu Space has attracted hundreds of large model start-up enterprises to settle in and provide them with relevant services in finance, computing power, language materials, talent, etc., providing a fertile soil for their innovation and entrepreneurship.\n\nThe creation of Modu Space also attracted the attention of capital markets. In October 2024, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem Fund was jointly launched by Shanghai Guotou Investment Company and several other state-owned platforms such as Xuhui Capital, Lingang Holdings, and Haojingjing. With a fund size of 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion), this fund will focus on investing in three subdivisions: AI infrastructure, basic and vertical large models, as well as next-generation end-side AI applications. The investment is aimed at driving industry innovation opportunities through industry chain upstream and downstream cooperation.\n\nLooking ahead to 2025, Shanghai has outlined a specific task for the AI industry. According to an implementation plan released in December 2024, Shanghai aims to build a world-class AI industry ecosystem by the end of 2025. The plan also calls for increasing smart computing power scale to exceed 100 EFLOPS by then. With technology continuously iterating at an unprecedented speed in AI field like never before Modu Space is playing an innovative leadership role in helping Shanghai stand at the forefront.\n\nTranslation by Projait Business News networkMedia。 这篇文章对核心信息做了较为详尽的报道，但鉴于原文信息丰富且可能存在个别细节不准确的情况，建议相关人士参考专业新闻源以获取最新信息。