Beijing banks on high-tech for global digital edge

Beijing is committed to leveraging its strengths in cutting-edge technologies, including 6G, artificial intelligence, large language models, blockchain, and quantum computing, to foster global technological cooperation and enhance its open-source ecosystem for the digital economy, according to a top city official.

"The city boasts a wealth of real-world digital use cases. Events like robot sports games and robot marathons have positioned the city as a pacesetter for digital tech lifestyle trends, and the smart tourist navigation systems benefit both locals and visitors," the city's Party chief Yin Li said during the opening ceremony of the Global Digital Economy Conference on Thursday.

He also urged for more innovations driven by global collaboration to benefit grassroots communities, enhance urban digital medical and educational services, and help the elderly benefit more from the digital economy.

Statistics indicate that Beijing's digital economy generated up to 2.4 trillion yuan ($353.5 billion), accounting for 46 percent of its GDP last year.

During the event, a global digital economy cities report and a collection of digital economy lighthouse cases from around the world were released.

The report highlighted Beijing's efforts, including a data-sharing project for 307 hospitals to support local residents in visiting doctors without needing to bring CT or X-ray film reports from different hospitals.

Further initiatives, such as an online data service platform developed by Beijing's local companies to assist domestic and foreign companies in their overseas ventures, will be unveiled on Friday.

Francis Gurry, chair of the Global Digital Economy Cities Alliance and former director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, emphasized the importance of data sharing and global collaborations: "The digital divide between cities continues to widen, fragmented standards are driving up the costs of collaboration, and the tension between digital sovereignty and open cooperation remains unresolved.

"The mutual recognition of standards, interoperability of data, and joint ecosystem building — the success of one city can light the way for many more," he said.

In addition to sharing more experiences in the digital economy era and further opening its data sources, Beijing announced its efforts to capitalize on the era, including its latest initiatives in the so-called token economy.

Peng Xuehai, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Government Services and Data Management, said, "Beijing has taken the lead in the token industry in a bid to shape a new digital economy model."

Tokens are the smallest unit of text processed by LLMs and other AI systems to understand and generate human language.

Beijing's first factory for producing units of text for LLMs has reached a daily production capacity of more than 1.4 trillion tokens, said the Administrative Committee of the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as E-Town.

The token factory will continue expanding toward the long-term goal of producing 10 trillion tokens per day, it added.

yangcheng@chinadaily.com.cn