Top city leaders meet representatives of firms attending the 2018 AI conference

Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang and Mayor Ying Yong met on Monday representatives from the companies participating in the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Li said Shanghai is the country’s biggest economic center and it’s accelerating the process of building itself into an excellent metropolis, a modern globally influential socialist city, and its five centers.

AI industry’s strategic technologies will lead the future and the city will build its AI highland to energize the innovative companies in the city, especially the AI companies.

The city hopes the companies in the innovation and AI industries could explore forward-looking layouts and provide constructive suggestions to the city’s AI industry. The city will work hard to provide a good AI eco-system and services for the companies, Li added.

Representatives such as Wang Huisheng, chairman of the State Development & Investment Corporation; Ding Lei, chairman and CEO of Netease; Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent; Gan Zhongxue, chairman of Zhejiang Robot Industrial & Trading Co; Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK Co; Liu Xiaodong, president of Sailing Capital International; Zhu Long, CEO of YITU Tech; Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon AWS China; Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor; Chen Zhikuan, president of Synopsys; Du Yongbo, managing director of China Renaissance Group; Li Qiang, global vice president of SAP; Song Anlan, managing partner of SBCVC; Andrew Ng, founder and CEO of Landing.AI; Wu Xiong’ang, executive vice president of ARM Holdings; Yu Liang, chairman of Wanke Group; Zhou Kui, partner of Sequoia China; John Glossner, CEO of Optimum Semiconductor Technologies Inc; Huang Liming, partner of Hillhouse Capital Group; Peng Jun, founder and CEO of Pony.AI; and Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA, attended the meeting and congratulated on the successful holding of the 2018 WAIC.

They said as an international city, Shanghai has its unique advantages for the development of the AI industry, including rich application scenes, copious amounts of data, factor resources, and global talents. They have great faith in Shanghai AI industry’s future development and are willing to strengthen the cooperation with the city.

City leaders Zhou Bo and Wu Qing also attended the meeting.