China's AI Enters Factories and Electricity Projects, Not Just Smart Answers

JAKARTA - AI often looks great on the screen. But in factories, power projects, and production rooms, the size is harder: can it cut time, reduce risk, and really be used.

Citing a report from China Daily, Friday, June 5, Chinese artificial intelligence researchers released the Real World AI or RWAI open source framework and a real-world scenario-based competition platform to accelerate the application of AI in the industry.

The initiative was developed by the AI innovation center at the Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University. The focus is no longer just on making AI models smarter, but bridging the gap between technological capabilities and field use.

The research team leader said the global AI industry is facing a big problem. The ability of models and devices is increasing very quickly, but adoption in the industry is slower.

Therefore, RWAI is designed to organize the way humans and machines work together. This framework includes role sharing, workflows, human-machine interactions, human feedback, and cross-team collaboration.

In practice, RWAI is rebuilding the way AI gets into real work. The system uses three bases: real-world tasks, human feedback from direct interaction, and default rules in human-AI relationships.

The research team said field tests showed that RWAI was more efficient than traditional software development models. The initial validation time of the project, which is usually two to three months, can be cut to less than two weeks.

The team also launched the arena AI platform. Unlike AI ranking boards that usually only compare models, this platform assesses AI solutions in real business operations.

The size used is closer to the needs of the company, such as organizational costs, time efficiency, computing costs, and compliance with rules.

The platform uses a challenger-champion mechanism. The competition is not a single model, but a complete solution. The content includes team composition, workflow, combination of AI agents, and context engineering.

AI agents are systems that can carry out certain tasks more independently. Context engineering means how to arrange information, instructions, and situations so that AI can provide the right results.

The winning solution will be opened as a best practice so that it can be replicated and reused.

China Daily's report said that the subsidiary of China Southern Power Grid's internet service has used RWAI to handle the safety management of the power grid infrastructure project, from planning to field work.

Previously, manual supervision faced efficiency limits due to complex compliance rules. With RWAI, companies develop intelligent risk control systems for work locations and subcontractor management.

As a result, the level of hidden risk detection increased by about 40 percent. The accuracy of risk warnings also reached 92 percent.

The company's senior engineer, Hu Rui, said RWAI helps bridge AI technology and real-world applications, while reducing the cost of trial and error.

According to Hu, the system transforms engineering management from merely responding to problems to a more proactive intelligent control.

The platform is also used by Jiangsu Eastern Shenghong, a petrochemical company that has been facing challenges in combining old industry knowledge with AI.

With RWAI, Eastern Shenghong integrates 30 years of production process knowledge with data from the entire industry chain. The goal is to build a large industry model that truly understands the company's business.

Through monitoring and predicting multimodal disruptions, the company is able to reduce unplanned downtime on key production lines. The system can also provide recommendations for more optimal production scheduling.

Multimodal means a system reads multiple types of data at once, such as text, numbers, images, or sensor signals.

Yang Tianwei, Vice Chairman of Eastern Shenghong and General Manager of the company's AI business unit, said the RWAI evaluation capability helps companies transform internal models into reusable, reconfigurable, and invoiced product libraries.

"This not only enables the intelligent development of Eastern Shenghong itself, but also provides field-tested best practice solutions for the large-scale application of the model in the process industry," Yang said, quoted by China Daily.

Currently, RWAI covers a wide range of uses, ranging from industrial forecasting systems, document review, risk control, to the creation of research reports.

Its implementation has also been used in the projects of a number of Fortune Global 500 companies.

The research team stated that the platform will provide real-world human-computer interaction data to support the development of large language models and academic research.