Produced by | Huabo Business Review

Over the past decade, Hangzhou capitalized on the rise of e-commerce and live streaming, propelling itself to the forefront. Now, as the next wave of AI technology emerges, Hangzhou is poised to continue its forward momentum.

'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons' Stir Up the Tech Scene

Hangzhou has consistently been at the vanguard. From the inception of Taobao in 2003 to its current status as a global e-commerce leader, the city seized the opportunity presented by the e-commerce and live streaming boom. From 2003 to 2023, Hangzhou's e-commerce transaction volume skyrocketed from 23 million yuan to 8.58 trillion yuan, while online retail sales jumped from 152.412 billion yuan to 1,232.19 billion yuan, accounting for nearly half of Zhejiang Province's total online retail sales.

In the current wave of AI technology, Hangzhou has once again demonstrated its strong competitiveness and forward-thinking vision. In 2024, six private small and micro enterprises founded by young tech talents, specializing in robotics and artificial intelligence, garnered global attention. Dubbed the 'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons,' these companies made significant impacts. In May, DeepSeek released DeepSeekV2, featuring an innovative model architecture and unparalleled cost-effectiveness, quickly gaining popularity. Its inference cost of just 1 yuan per million tokens was one-seventh of Llama3 70B and one-seventieth of GPT-4 Turbo, earning it the moniker 'Pinduoduo of the large model world.'

This move sparked a price war among tech giants like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Baidu, prompting them to adjust their pricing strategies. In August, Game Science's Hangzhou team unveiled 'Black Myth: Wukong,' which not only stunned the domestic gaming community but also set a global sales record for the first domestic single-player 3A game. On December 13, Unitree Technology released a mesmerizing demonstration video of its B2-W robot dog, capable of traversing mountains, climbing slopes, and carrying heavy loads with agile responses and outstanding performance.

After being shared by Musk, the video garnered widespread attention and heated discussions among overseas netizens, making them deeply aware of the mysterious power emanating from the East. Also in December, DeepSeek made another splash by releasing the technical report of the DeepSeekV3 model, reigniting the AI community. This open-source model, trained with just 5.5 million yuan and 2,000 cards, is said to achieve similar results to OpenAI's investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the limited computing power available to domestic enterprises, DeepSeek's training efficiency and effectiveness have garnered praise from industry professionals. The 'Hangzhou Six Little Dragons' also include BrainCo, a leader in brain-computer interfaces in China; CloudMinds, a pioneering enterprise in quadruped robots; and Rokid, the largest human-computer interaction platform in terms of domestic consumer product shipments in the XR field.

Looking Beyond the 'Six Little Dragons'

The collective success of the 'Six Little Dragons' is but a microcosm of Hangzhou's technological innovation and development. From January to November 2024, Hangzhou's high-tech industry value added reached 288.2 billion yuan, accounting for 72.33% of the above-scale industry, a record high. Simultaneously, the city's technology transaction volume reached 124.9 billion yuan, ranking first in the province. Hangzhou's rise to prominence is inseparable from its years of dedication and investment in technological innovation.

Hangzhou and even the entire Zhejiang Province have been committed to fostering new productive forces, reaping fruitful results through continuous innovation and exploration. For instance, in the field of robotics, Hangzhou has shown advanced insight and keen layout awareness. As early as 2017, Zhejiang took the lead in issuing the 'Zhejiang "Robot+" Action Plan,' becoming the first province in China to clearly propose a 'Robot+' policy. As the capital of Zhejiang, Hangzhou has actively responded, vigorously promoting the development of the robotics industry. Today, Hangzhou boasts over 200 robot-related enterprises, with a robot industrial output value of 15 billion yuan in 2023. These enterprises have made remarkable achievements in key areas such as robot parts production, complete machine manufacturing, and system integration, laying a solid foundation for the thriving robotics industry in Hangzhou.

In addition to the robotics industry, Hangzhou has long made deep inroads into the field of artificial intelligence. Since 2017, Hangzhou has actively promoted the construction and layout of the AI industry, focusing on technological innovation, industrial cultivation, and integrated applications. In 2022, Zhejiang issued up to 53 policies related to the AI industry, and in 2023, it successively released a series of policy documents, including the 'Guiding Opinions on Cultivating and Developing Future Industries' and the 'Zhejiang Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan (2023-2025),' aimed at accelerating the penetration and integration of AI technology and stimulating the vitality of future industries.

That same year, Hangzhou also introduced policies such as the 'Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Innovation and Development of the AI Industry' and the 'Several Measures to Accelerate the High-Quality Development of the New Materials Industry,' clearly stating that by 2025, it will cultivate 5 high-level AI demonstration parks, 20 empowering benchmark enterprises, and 30 typical application scenarios. Furthermore, Hangzhou actively encourages the deep application of industrial robots, service robots, and machine vision, annually collecting a batch of replicable and scalable application scenario opening projects and providing financial subsidies to construction units to further promote the implementation and popularization of AI technology.