Zhou Bowen: The development path of AI technology is transitioning towards integration of general and specialized applications, building a large-scale intelligent industry cluster to reduce application costs.

On March 23, the China Development Forum 2026 Annual Meeting on the Industrial Application of Artificial Intelligence was held in Beijing. Zhou Bowen, Director of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Chief Scientist, stated that artificial intelligence is experiencing three technological trends: the first trend is the shift from "binary opposition" to integration of general and specialized paths; the second trend is the shift from "problem-solving" to "task completion" in application capabilities; the third trend is that scientific discovery is the ultimate test of intelligence. How should we respond to these technological trends in the future? Zhou Bowen made four suggestions: firstly, to strengthen the basic ability of large models, as the basic large model is the core competitiveness of artificial intelligence, there needs to be a focus on professional application capabilities to achieve a dual drive of "strong foundation and specialization"; secondly, to build large-scale intelligent industry clusters to reduce application costs and promote the reconstruction of the entire industry value chain; additionally, to create an inclusive and open policy and market environment to stimulate the continuous emergence of new technologies and explosive growth of new applications; and finally, to continuously strengthen governance capacity building to achieve mutual support and coordinated development of security and technical iteration.