Humans must keep control of artificial intelligence

Editor's note: There are growing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence agents. Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, spoke to China Economic Times about how to mitigate them. Below are excerpts of the interview. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

Large AI models have been widely adopted nowadays, demonstrating strong capabilities in answering questions, generating documents and more. But they are essentially language models that rely primarily on statistical computations to generate the most probable outputs. They lack genuine perception and understanding of the physical world, and are prone to "hallucinations".

More importantly, they struggle when deployed in real industrial scenarios tasked with completing practical assignments.