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People interact with a robot during the 2025 Global Developer Conference on February 22, 2025. Photo: VCG

The 2025 Global Developer Conference (GDC) concluded on Sunday in Shanghai, where large models and calls for open source became highlights and industry practitioners expressed expectation for rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents in 2025. 

"We believe that large models are still in a rapid development phase. Large models will soon reach the level of professionals in specialized fields. Once this is realized, we believe a new product form will emerge, and this product form is likely to be AI agents," Liu Hua, vice president of Shanghai-based AI start-up MiniMax who attended the GDC, told the Global Times. 

AI agents could enhance productivity and reshape the economy, while large language models would help unleash human creativity, Liu said.

According to definitions by some tech giants, an AI agent refers to a software program or system powered by AI that can perform tasks, make decisions, or interact with its environment autonomously or semi-autonomously.

With continuous breakthroughs in AI technology and the ongoing expansion of application scenarios, AI agents are likely to enter a new stage of development this year, Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Wang said that AI agents may realize massive application in various fields, such as smart manufacturing, smart cities, healthcare and financial services, where AI can empower industrial innovation and upgrading. AI agents are expected to redefine productivity and innovation for businesses, he added.

In China, AI agents have been gradually applied in some fields, such as agriculture, where AI agents monitor soil moisture and pests, provide planting advice and improve crop yields.

"Our smart greenhouses can identify the humidity, temperature and nutrition situation of crops, and automatically water and supplement fertilizer, which was realized through cloud computing and AI technologies," Sun Xiaohua, head of Sunjiagang Ecological Garden in Yichang, Central China's Hubei Province, told the Global Times. 

The intelligent system can also detect insects and spray pesticides in a timely and sufficient amount, which has greatly reduced farmers' burdens, said Sun.

At the GDC, open source in the AI sector also became a hot topic, with some industry practitioners attributing China rapid development in AI to open-source initiatives. 

In the thriving AI industry, the spirit of open source and openness is becoming a consensus within the field, said Liu. "The essence of open source is the sharing of technology - it enables global developers to share the benefits of innovation, while compelling companies to enhance their core competitiveness."

The force of this wave of AI stems from open source, which lowers technical barriers, enabling innovations to rapidly transit from laboratories to industrial applications, Jia Anya, product director at SenseTime, told the Global Times. The company announced the debut of LazyLLM, an open-source agent application development framework, at the GDC.

China ranks second globally in the number of open-source contributors. Driven by a vast community of developers, there has been accelerated progress in open-source large model technologies and products. The flexibility, transparency and cost advantages of open-source models are bringing new opportunities to the development of the AI industry, the Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the GDC. 

In terms of scale, China's AI industry is also rising rapidly. In Shanghai, where the GDC was held, the local AI industry scale surpassed 450 billion yuan ($62.06 billion) in 2024, with year-on-year growth of over 7.8 percent. The well-established industrial ecosystem provides crucial support for innovative enterprises, according to a China Media Group report on Sunday.

As one of the examples, the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center (SMC) has attracted more than 250 companies spanning from computing to data on the AI industrial chain. The SMC, launched in October 2023, stands as one of China's first dedicated incubators and accelerators for large-scale AI models.