At the 2024 Beijing International Automobile Exhibition held recently, in front of the iFLYTEK booth in the exhibition area of intelligent supply chain enterprises, the smart cockpit equipped with large model technology attracted visitors.
The number of vehicle mounted intelligent products installed in front (factory equipment) has exceeded 57 million, and the annual number of voice interactions has exceeded 10 billion; Support mainstream mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, OPPO and VIVO, and activate more than 1 billion devices in total... As a student entrepreneurship enterprise of University of Science and Technology of China, iFLYTEK Co., Ltd. insists on source innovation, and has won the National Science and Technology Progress Award twice, enabling high-quality economic and social development with artificial intelligence technology.
Large model technology iteration, upgrading and innovation application scenarios
When entering the iFLYTEK Research Institute of the University of Science and Technology, in front of rows of computers, researchers are grasping the training of the Spark Cognition Big Model. The "intelligence" of the big model is constantly upgrading and will be used in education, medical care, industry, transportation and other fields in the future.
Large model technology is an important development direction of artificial intelligence technology. According to Liu Cong, president of the iFLYTEK Research Institute of the University of Science and Technology, the company has concentrated its resources on the research and development of the big model technology. Since the first release of the Spark Cognition big model on May 6, 2023, it has completed four key version upgrades and iterations. Its logical reasoning, mathematical ability, language understanding and other indicators are leading the industry.
Based on the first large model of completely independent intellectual property rights for domestic computing power training, iFLYTEK aims at the needs of economic and social development and constantly promotes the application of advanced AI technology.
In Jinjialin Campus of Mianyang No. 2 Middle School in Sichuan Province, Yang Haoran, a math teacher, is checking the student evaluation on the smart education platform. The platform has generated a "portrait" of each student's knowledge points, and on this basis, personalized learning resources are pushed to students.
On the iFLYTEK Antelope Industrial Internet platform, AI technology has driven industrial production efficiency to improve significantly, management has been continuously optimized, and accelerated the formation of new quality productivity. At present, this national "double cross" platform (cross industry and cross domain industrial Internet platform) has settled more than one million users.
Scientific and technological innovation leads to new consumption demand. At the Budapest Track and Field World Championships held in August 2023, iFLYTEK translation machine helped athletes from all countries communicate with each other by virtue of its translation ability in more than 80 languages, which attracted the attention of local media. In November of that year, iFLYTEK's sales of intelligent hardware, including translation machines and office books, increased by 126% year on year.
Integrate superior resources and stimulate talent vitality
At the 2023 annual conference of iFLYTEK, Wang Leiqi, a "post-90s" employee, was rated as the "Star of iFLYTEK" of the year for his contributions such as breaking through the traditional data collection and tagging mechanism and improving the speech recognition effect of vulnerable scenes to 30%. Along with him, there are more than 100 front-line employees who have made breakthroughs in technical innovation and project implementation.
In order to stimulate the vitality of talents, iFLYTEK, in addition to carrying out a series of appraisal activities, has also implemented the "Feifan Plan" and "Feixing Plan", breaking the age and position restrictions to select talents, while continuously optimizing the patent incentive management methods.
In recent years, none of the core core team of iFLYTEK Research Institute has left. "R&D funds are fully guaranteed, and administrative work can be saved." Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, said that the average annual R&D investment of iFLYTEK accounted for about 20% of the operating revenue.
Talents are the first resource for innovation. IFLYTEK was born in the Speech Laboratory (formerly the Language Communication Laboratory) of the University of Science and Technology of China, and most of its core technology backbones come from the University of Science and Technology of China. Over the years, iFLYTEK has continuously gathered scientific research resources nationwide. As of March 2024, it has formed long-term technical cooperation relationships with more than 30 universities, institutes and research institutes.
With generations of scientific researchers forging ahead, iFLYTEK has climbed to several technical peaks, such as speech synthesis technology surpassing ordinary people's speaking level for the first time, machine reading comprehension ability surpassing human average level for the first time, and common sense reasoning single model surpassing human average level for the first time, and has systematically mastered key core technologies of artificial intelligence.
Form industrial ecology and accelerate the accumulation of kinetic energy
At the Digital China Building in Zhongguancun, Beijing, the future staff of Smart Image are using tools based on multimodal large models to generate videos. According to Wang Ke, the chief operating officer of the company, as a start-up company, Zhixiang will lay a technical foundation for the company's research and development in the future by invoking the AI technology on the iFLYTEK open platform.
Since 2010, iFLYTEK has released an open platform to provide voice synthesis and recognition, semantic understanding, mobile application analysis and other services for developers. As of March 31 this year, the platform has opened 660 AI products and capabilities, gathering more than 6.38 million developer teams and about 2.298 million applications, including users such as Gaud Maps and Himalayas.
Xu Zhijun, vice chairman and rotating chairman of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., said that the voice technology of intelligent terminals currently used by Huawei in the world comes from iFLYTEK.
More and more domestic innovative entrepreneurs form an industrial ecology around the iFLYTEK open platform.
In 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Anhui Province, relying on iFLYTEK, established China Sound Valley in Hefei High tech Zone. At present, it has formed a voice and artificial intelligence industry chain from basic research, technology research and development, platform support to industrial development and application. "There are more than 2000 enterprises settled here, with an annual output value of 200 billion yuan," said Wang Wei, deputy director of Hefei Economic and Information Bureau.
AI is an important engine for developing new quality productivity. The 2024 government work report further clarifies that we should deepen the research and application of big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, carry out the "artificial intelligence+" action, and build a digital industrial cluster with international competitiveness.
Facing the new journey, iFLYTEK is aiming at the world's advanced level, grasping the "bull's nose" of innovation, and accelerating the use of artificial intelligence technology to create new advantages for high-quality development. Journalists Zhang Ziyun and Wang Haiyue
