AI brings new challenges and opportunities to infrastructure software, the community said. AIPC’s goal of openKylin is to “dramatically improve” work efficiency and the creative experience of users of internally developed operating systems, the group said.
In a report released Monday, China’s state-run Science and Technology Daily called the AI version of openKylin “safe, stable and controllable.”
Escalating trade tensions between the United States and China have only intensified Beijing’s efforts to achieve technological self-sufficiency.
The open-source community was jointly launched by Kylinsoft – the maker of Linux-based Kylin and a subsidiary of state-owned China Electronics – along with more than 10 other Chinese entities, including the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center.
In July last year, the community released its first open source desktop operating system, openKylin 1.0, which it says was developed by 3,876 developers with contributions from 271 companies.
Operating systems developed in China have made little progress over the years. According to data analysis firm StatCounter, Windows accounted for nearly 80% of the Chinese market as of June this year.
OpenKylin is now betting on the same industry-wide trend of AI PCs, fueled by hopes that AI applications can revive demand for PCs. AI PCs refer to computers with processors that are advanced enough to comfortably run some AI generative tasks locally instead of processing queries in the cloud.
The race to bring such devices to market intensified this year after Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs, which run Microsoft’s own Copilot generative AI software and require a neural processing unit capable of handling at least 40 trillion operations per second, a measure of how quickly an AI model can respond to a query.
In the absence of popular foreign generative AI services such as Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Chinese AI PCs will also have to rely on domestic LLMs.
