CEOs of three online firms peep into a future where artificial intelligence will likely reign supreme

Editor's Note: The fourth World Internet Conference, also known as the Wuzhen Summit, opens on Sunday in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, and will close on Tuesday.

In the run-up to the event, China Daily reporters Ouyang Shijia, Fan Feifei and Jing Shuiyu interacted with top executives from three up-and-coming online businesses and sought their views on the raging topics in the world of the internet.

Wang Jing, founder and CEO of JingChi Corp, a Chinese autonomous driving developer, Xiao Hong, CEO of Perfect World Co Ltd, "China's earliest online game company with overseas operations", and Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou Inc, an online search engine and browser, discussed how the internet is reshaping innovation and how it will likely influence larger economic forces in the years to come. Excerpts:

How do you view China's role in the global internet arena? In your view, what are the most innovative trends or products in China?

Wang Jing: China is a key player in this mobile internet trend, and it is very likely that China will seize the leadership in the next few years.

China has been proven successful and innovative in various sectors - online payments, the O2O (online-to-offline) segment and social networking.

In the next era of artificial intelligence, China will be a great power although it is still in its infancy. It already shows big advantages in computer vision, voice recognition and autonomous driving. On the research side, China also has the highest number of cited papers concerning "deep learning" or "deep neural network".

Xiao Hong: Over the past 23 years, the number of China's netizens has grown greatly and huge achievements have been made in network infrastructure, making China the true network power.

Starting from scratch and developing from weak to strong, network informatization in China has achieved a lot.

China has been advancing in network construction, allowing the achievements of internet development to benefit the 1.3 billion Chinese and people from other countries.

On Nov 16 last year, the Chinese government stressed in the third World Internet Conference that the country should ensure the common well-being of humanity, uphold cyber sovereignty, promote more fair and equitable global internet governance and bring about an open, inclusive and secure cyberspace that underlines equality, mutual respect, innovation and orderly development.

Well-being of humanity is a goal that fully reposes confidence and responsibility in China in internet global governance.

The most innovative part is that we have both a systematic theory and a firm practice of that. Our goal is to allow the achievement of internet development to benefit all the Chinese.

We clearly realize that cybersecurity and informatization are bound together. We are implementing three plans - the internet power strategy, the "Internet Plus" action plan and the national big data strategy.

Our goals are populating the network infrastructure, enhancing innovative ability, developing the information economy and improving cybersecurity.

We insist on the principle of respecting cyber-sovereignty, maintaining peace and security, promoting cooperation and building order.

Wang Xiaochuan: Chinese internet companies are taking a leading position around the world, not only in providing technologies to support their users but in offering novel business models.

The internet sectors of China and the United States are well-matched in strength. There are four Chinese internet companies and six American internet companies in the top 10 list worldwide.

At present, the most innovative trend in China is sharing economy, which is beyond our inherent thinking pattern.