Heat, hardware and high stakes at China’s biggest World Artificial Intelligence Conference

Traffic almost came to a standstill 2km (1.2 miles) from the Shanghai-expo-centre" class="entity-link entity-location" data-entity-id="169162" data-entity-type="location">Shanghai Expo Centre on Friday, the first day of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). With temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), scores of attendees abandoned their taxis to walk the rest of the way under the hot sun.This year’s conference mirrored the weather: it was the hottest, most crowded WAIC in my six years covering the event and, I was told, the most vibrant since its inception in 2018.One thing that made the event so different this year was the presence of President Xi Jinping, who delivered his first WAIC keynote speech at the expo centre, saying China would seize the “rare historic opportunity” of AI-driven growth by “encouraging open source, openness, collaboration and sharing”.