BEIJING:The Chinese government has for the first time recruited 31 high school students to join an experimental artificial intelligence (AI)-driven programme to develop intelligent weapons systems at the elite Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT).
REUTERS FILE■ Chinese solders at an honour guard in Beijing
The students, including four girls, will be the first batch to take the four-year course titled “experimental programme for intelligent weapons systems”.
The recruits will begin training as the world’s youngest AI scientists at BIT, which is among China’s leading weapons research institutes, South China Morning Post reported. More than 5,000 students had applied for the 31 seats. The programme was launched at the headquarters of Norinco, one of China’s biggest defence contractors, on October 28. News about the new batch was published on BIT’s website but subsequently deleted. An online snapshot of the BIT post provided details about the programme and what it aims to achieve. Quoting a statement from the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, BIT said the new batch was an effort to implement the idea of establishing science and technology as the core combat capability and “providing important support for building a first-class national defence science and technology industrial system”.