The 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC2023) is about to open in Shanghai. More than 30 major models, such as Baidu Wenxin, Ali Tongyi, Huawei Pangu, and iFLYTEK Spark, are all on the stage. The core development team behind it will bring relevant discussions on the path of the big model.
At the time of vigorous development of the domestic AI industry, as the birthplace of this round of AI wave, how is the latest technology, mode and application development of each technology leader in Silicon Valley where OpenAI is located? With the influx of funds, will there be a high certainty track in the future?
Kong Rong, co president of the Tianfeng Global Prospective Industry Research Institute and the chief of Tianfeng Media&Overseas, went to Silicon Valley this June to communicate with a group of AI representative companies and practitioners. "Compared with domestic enterprises that focus on the application of AI in the C-end, Silicon Valley enterprises have concentrated on the B-end industry, and both the depth and speed of development are faster." Kong Rong said in an exclusive interview with the Securities Times e company that it is expected that this year the large model of domestic enterprises will reach the technical level of GPT3.5.
Focus on B-end AI application
The AI big model represented by ChatGPT has undoubtedly become the global focus this year. With the increase of users' use of dialogue, people are more and more interested in AI applications. Bing integrates ChatGPT into Office to improve work efficiency. After MidJourney started the AI global picture creation boom, Bing also released its own AI drawing application.
In the face of a new wave of AI, how should investors view the market opportunities and development prospects brought by AI development? Kong Rong went to Silicon Valley this June to communicate with a group of AI representative companies and practitioners.
Kong Rong found during his research in the Silicon Valley where OpenAI is located that ChatGPT can become the product with the fastest growth in the number of users in the world, mainly because there is almost no learning cost and threshold for the use of conversational applications, and the connection and integration of ChatGPT with the whole industry are relatively smooth. "ChatGPT, like mainstream products such as Tiao Yin and Meta, represents the coming of the next era, and its growth rate may symbolize that AIGC, represented by ChatGPT, will break the inherent business model and penetrate into the whole industry at an unimaginable speed."
"Compared with domestic enterprises, they pay more attention to the application of AI in the C-end. Silicon Valley enterprises have concentrated on the B-end industry." Kong Rong said that the biggest feeling in the Silicon Valley research is that there are many small applications of AI in the B-end productivity tools in the U.S. market. Only a few people need to rely on the big model to develop a new application. Almost every few days, there are new products and new applications in the actual scene of the enterprise.
In addition to focusing on the B-end, the visited American technology companies have a high understanding of AI, and generally believe that this AI revolution is an inflection point of the human industrial revolution. "Similar to the explosion of the cloud computing industry that year triggered the development wave of American technology companies, this AI revolution will also bring about the accelerated development of global technology companies." From the application model, Kong Rong found that a large number of applications of American technology enterprises have been added to AI functions, and the next step of AI model will rewrite the software, transform the workflow, and achieve overall efficiency improvement.
The domestic big models are catching up quickly
It is worth noting that the domestic large model industry is in the outbreak period, developing rapidly, but there is also a tendency of homogenization. Compared with the United States, what is the progress of domestic models in catching up with the world's leading level?
Kong Rong said that according to the current development speed in China, it is expected that the domestic large model can reach the technical level of GPT3.5 this year. Based on the technology of overseas open source model, a number of domestic enterprises can reach this level. "But what's more urgent is to implement the application. After all, the big model needs to be put into practical use." Kong Rong said.
As one of the active enterprises in the domestic AI field, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, said when attending the "Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum" of 2023 Global Digital Economy Conference that the big model will become the standard configuration of every digital system, and mobile phones and cars can be deployed everywhere.
It is still difficult to determine who the domestic technology enterprises will lead in the new round of AI revolution. If the original products of the enterprise can have traffic and can be combined with the existing scenarios and AI technologies, it may generate greater user stickiness. Kong Rong said, "Whether it's byte hopping or Tencent, they may have traffic advantages and scene advantages. Under the challenges in the future, we also need to see what kind of breakthrough they can find and whether they can have breakthrough ways to achieve transcendence."
In terms of hardware, AI has no ceiling for computing power. "With the pursuit of AI multimodal generation capability by domestic and overseas technology enterprises, the demand for computing power will only increase and will become increasingly scarce." Kong Rong pointed out that the demand for computing power may continue to grow.
The shortage of computing power also leads to another phenomenon. According to the data of Similarweb, a website traffic monitoring service provider, since this year, the month on month growth rate of ChatGPT visits in January has been 131.6%, and since then it has declined month by month. By May, this figure had dropped to 2.8%, and it is expected that there will be negative month on month growth in June.
Kong Rong said that the decline in the number of visitors may be due to various reasons, including computing power, other new AI applications and API streaming, but the AI development trend is still very strong. "Under the tight computing power, ChatGPT has been limiting the number of users and registration. At the same time, if it is just a productivity tool, ChatGPT's use duration and user stickiness must be insufficient. So ChatGPT has been increasing product mobility and application richness, including the launch of app stores and the addition of plug-ins."
Focus on multimodal content generation
At present, the research and development of large models in China has entered a white hot stage. According to the Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum of 2023 Global Digital Economy Conference, more than 80 major models have been released in China so far.
In this regard, Kong Rong's research in Silicon Valley found that compared with domestic enterprises competing for the big model, American technology enterprises have mainly researched and developed AI applications. AI has been widely used in American enterprises, such as writing emails, publishing job advertisements, writing articles, and analyzing data.
From the perspective of generative AI content, Kong Rong believes that since the end of June when Unity officially announced two new AI platforms to accelerate the creation of real-time 3D applications and experiences such as games, AR/VR, metauniverse, and digital twins, generative AI has become a new trend in the development of American technology enterprises from text and pictures to multimodal discovery.
"Multimode means that AI can generate video, audio and various scenes in addition to text and pictures. At present, the ability of multimodality is not very mature, but this year to next year, AI will generate video and 3D animation, which will become the main direction of American technology companies. This will have a major change in the ecology of the film, television and game industries."
Based on the research in Silicon Valley, Kong Rong believes that AI applications represented by ChatGPT should focus on the scenes including robots, autonomous driving, and the combination of XR and AI, so as to promote the acceleration of iteration in these industries.
In May this year, Tesla Optimus has evolved again. With the recent warming of domestic robot policy, the robot industry is entering a leap forward development with the support of AI. In addition, AI has important scenarios in the XR field. "The two cores of XR are content and interaction. After the introduction of AI, interaction can be more natural by understanding your operation; the ability of AI in content has been confirmed," Kong Rong said.
"The next ten years will be a very important decade for scientific and technological innovation and the start of a new round of scientific and technological cycle, so I have always been optimistic about TMT and the next opportunities." Kong Rong believes that the next ten years, including XR, robots, automatic driving, film and television content, will enter an era of explosive change driven by AI.
