Highlights of the 2024 National Standards Committee AI Sub‑Committee Conference Week and Ant Group’s Contributions

From April 23‑25, 2024, the National Standards Committee Artificial Intelligence Sub‑Committee Conference Week was held in Hangzhou, co‑organized by the national AI standards bodies and hosted by Ant Group, attracting more than 400 experts from government, industry, academia, and research institutions.

Key speakers included Deputy Director‑General Gan Xiaobin of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Deputy Director‑General He Guoqiang of Zhejiang’s Economic and Information Technology Department, who emphasized the strategic importance of AI standardization and its role in empowering industry.

Ant Group highlighted its extensive work in foundational AI technologies, privacy‑preserving computation, high‑performance graph computing, and the deployment of large‑model solutions across finance, healthcare, and mobility sectors.

During the conference, Ant Group’s Wealth Insurance Business Unit General Manager Lu Xin presented the practical implementation of Ant’s large‑model technology in finance, describing how a combination of large‑ and small‑model approaches, knowledge‑enhancement, and retrieval‑enhancement addressed challenges of domain knowledge, complex decision‑making, and reliability, and introduced two products: the intelligent financial assistant “Zhi Xiao Bao 2.0” and the expert‑oriented “Zhi Xiao Zhu”.

In the medical application workgroup session, Ant’s Large‑Model Application General Manager Gu Jinjie demonstrated the “An Zhen’er” digital human service in collaboration with the Zhejiang Health Commission, illustrating Ant’s joint efforts with the medical ecosystem to advance large‑model applications and outlining future plans for an Alipay medical assistant.

The conference also announced the appointment of leaders for four new workgroups, including the Medical Application Workgroup led by Shuting (Director of the National Health Commission Hospital Management Research Institute) with Ant’s Fan Cong as co‑leader, and the Financial Application Workgroup led by Zhang Dajian of China Financial Certification Center with Ant’s Lu Xin as co‑leader.

Ant Group emphasized the strategic role of standards in supporting AI industry development and listed its participation in numerous national and industry standards such as the “Information Technology – AI Management System”, “AI Pre‑trained Model”, “AI Trustworthy – Part 1: General Principles”, “AI Knowledge Graph – Knowledge Exchange Protocol”, as well as industry standards like “AI Deep‑Synthetic Image System Technical Specification” and “AI Financial Large‑Model System Technical Requirements”, and contributions to CESA and IEEE 2807 standards.