The choice of path for the development of artificial intelligence is crucial, as it relates to the sustainability of China's development and the ultimate international competitive landscape. In general, China should develop affordable, secure and credible AI technology to eliminate the information poor and benefit the "the Belt and Road" countries and regions; Empowering various industries with low barriers to entry, maintaining the competitiveness of China's advantageous industries, and significantly narrowing the gap between relatively backward industries. Should we focus on algorithmic models or new infrastructure? Artificial intelligence technology empowers various industries and has a typical long tail effect. 80% of China's small and medium-sized enterprises require low threshold and low-priced intelligent services. Therefore, China's intelligent computing industry must be built on a new data space infrastructure, and the key is to achieve comprehensive infrastructure of intelligent elements (data, computing power, algorithms) first. This work can be compared to the historical role of the American Information Highway Program (i.e., the construction of information infrastructure) in the Internet industry in the early 20th century. The most essential productivity of the information society is cyberspace. The evolution process of cyberspace is from the computing space composed of machine unary connections, to the information space composed of human-machine information binary connections, and then to the data space composed of human-machine object data ternary connections. From the perspective of data space, the essence of AI is the "steeling" of data, and the big model is the product of in-depth processing of the full amount of Internet data. In the digital era, information flow is transmitted on the Internet, which is the structural abstraction after rough processing of data; In the intelligent era, what is transmitted on the Internet is an intelligent stream, which is a model-based abstraction after deep processing and refining of data by computing power. A core feature of intelligent computing is the use of algorithms such as numerical computation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence to process massive amounts of data in a computing power pool to obtain intelligent models, which are then embedded into various processes in the information and physical worlds. The Chinese government has proactively laid out new infrastructure and seized the opportunity in competition among countries around the world. Firstly, data has become a national strategic information resource. Data has dual attributes of resource elements and value processing. Among them, the resource element attributes of data cover various links such as production, acquisition, transmission, aggregation, circulation, transaction, ownership, assets, and security. China should continue to increase efforts to build a national data hub and data circulation infrastructure. Secondly, AI big models are the 'algorithmic infrastructure' of the data space. Building an infrastructure for the research and application of large-scale models based on universal models, supporting the development of specialized large-scale models for enterprises, serving various fields such as robotics, autonomous driving, wearable devices, smart homes, and intelligent security, covering long tail applications. Finally, the construction of a nationwide integrated computing power network has played a leading role in promoting the infrastructure of computing power. The Chinese plan for computing infrastructure should provide high-throughput and high-quality intelligent services to the widest range of people while significantly reducing the cost and threshold of computing usage. The Chinese solution for computing infrastructure needs to have the characteristics of "two lows and one high". On the supply side, the total cost of computing devices, computing equipment, network connections, data acquisition, algorithm model calling, power consumption, operation and maintenance, and development and deployment will be significantly reduced, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to afford high-quality computing services and actively develop computing network applications. On the consumer side, significantly reduce the threshold for users to use computing power. Public services aimed at the general public must be easily accessible and usable, just like water and electricity that can be used immediately. Users can easily customize computing power services and develop computing power web applications like writing web pages. In terms of service efficiency, China's computing power services need to achieve low entropy and high throughput. Among them, high-throughput refers to meeting the response time requirements of end-to-end services while achieving high concurrency services; Low entropy refers to the situation where the system flux does not sharply decrease in the event of unordered resource competition in high concurrency loads. Simply put, 'counting' is particularly important for our country. Should we focus on empowering the virtual economy or strengthening the real economy? The effectiveness of "AI+" is the touchstone of the value of artificial intelligence. China tends to promote the synchronous development of the real economy and the virtual economy, placing greater emphasis on the development of real economies such as equipment manufacturing, new energy vehicles, photovoltaic power generation, lithium batteries, high-speed rail, and 5G. China's manufacturing industry has the most complete industrial categories and system in the world, with the characteristics of multiple scenarios and private data. We should select several industries to increase investment and form a paradigm that can be promoted across the entire industry with low barriers to entry. For example, choosing the equipment manufacturing industry as a representative industry for continuing advantages, and choosing the pharmaceutical industry as a representative industry for rapidly narrowing the gap. The technical difficulty of empowering the real economy with artificial intelligence lies in the integration of AI algorithms and physical mechanisms. The key to the success of AI technology is to significantly reduce the cost of an industry or a product, thereby expanding the number of users and the scale of the industry by 10 times, producing a transformation effect similar to that of steam engines for the textile industry and smartphones for the Internet industry. China should take a high-quality development path of empowering the real economy with artificial intelligence that suits itself. (Author: Sun Ninghui, academician of the CAE Member)