China has developed its first brain-like artificial intelligence (AI) tech laboratory with the aim of pooling the country's top researchers and enhance the technology. The facility was inaugurated on Saturday in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province.

The lab, which was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in January and based in China University of Science and Technology (USTC), wants to develop brain-like computing paradigm and applications, the state-backed Global Times reported.

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The USTC has been known for its leading role in quantum communication technology development, hosting the national lab in collaboration with several top research bodies in China including Fudan University, Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chinese online search engine giant Baidu.

Wan Lijun, USTC's president and chairman, said that the capability to mimic the human brain's ability to sort out information will help develop a complete AI technology development paradigm. The lab is also expected to conduct research to guide machine learning such as recognizing messages, utilizing visual neural networks to solve problems, and developing applications with technological achievements.

Amid the recent inauguration of China's first national laboratory, the scientific community worldwide has significantly taken notice of the increasing progress of Beijing. In fact, former US President Barack Obama released a strategic plan for AI research in October, which also noted that the US is no longer the world's leader in "deep learning" journal articles.

"China has a fairly deep awareness of what's happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true," Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientists, said. He noted that Baidu has already introduced neural network-based machine translation and achieved speech recognition accuracy that outperformed humans; but when Google and Microsoft, respectively, rolled out their own version of the same tech, it attracted more publicity.

"The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley," Ng noted.