Big Data boosts China's artificial intelligence over "deification"

From Baidu "Apollo Project" 10 billion Nuggets driverless, to the "Alfa Dog" defeated the world's first person Ke Jie, and then to the Google real-time translation headset turned out ... artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly the most popular at the moment Technology topics and investment hot spots.

As a big country in Internet application innovation, in recent years, China's development in the field of artificial intelligence has been particularly rapid. Innovative applications in areas such as driverlessness, financial services, and voice recognition have emerged in an endless stream, fostering distinct advantages in the international arena. However, people in the industry have warned that the development of this new industry has a tendency to overwhelm and be "deified," and even if it is misguided, it will even "left behind" in the international community. Experts suggested that China should speed up the cultivation of external core competitiveness, establish a sense of corporate ownership in the field of industrial development, make a fuss about enterprise innovation, amplify existing advantages, and accelerate the artificial intelligence industry to achieve “change lanes and overtaking” abroad.

AI to 2.0 era

Giants compete in the ring

"After years of cultivation, artificial intelligence is moving toward the 2.0 era." Pan Yunhe, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, is full of confidence in the prospect of artificial intelligence. In his view, artificial intelligence in the past pursued computer simulations. Today's artificial intelligence integrates people and computers together to form a human-computer integration enhancement system. The drastic changes in the information environment, the outbreak of new social needs, and the radical changes in the foundations and goals of artificial intelligence have prompted artificial intelligence to move toward a new generation.

In recent years, China has emerged high-speed rail, Alipay, shared bicycles and online shopping "new four major inventions", has been Mercedes-Benz on the innovative highway, and the world's leading artificial intelligence countries go hand in hand, bright spots, especially in smart manufacturing, finance Services and other industries are nurturing core competitive advantages.

A few days ago, Liu Qing, President of Didi Chuxing, frankly stated in an exclusive interview with U.S. public television programs that he is now completing 25 million singles per day and completing 600 orders per second during peak hours. Each order is backed by millions of calculations. "Technology is really helping more people get to the car faster. This is also the amazing aspect of artificial intelligence."

"Domestic companies always keep up with the pace of development of artificial intelligence in the world, and some areas even achieve leadership." Li Yanhong, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu, pointed out. Although Baidu has taken some detours in its development in the past few years, it has always been steadfast in the field of artificial intelligence. As early as the end of 2015, Baidu announced that its speech recognition accuracy has exceeded the artificial level. Baidu has tried to use artificial intelligence and face recognition to help find lost people. There have been many successful cases.

Alibaba has applied artificial intelligence to various businesses such as transaction risk control, smart customer service, and intelligent investment advice. Ma Yun, chairman of the Alibaba Group Board of Directors, said that Alibaba started as an Alipay and was analyzing the scammers' thinking mode, allowing the machine to learn tens of thousands of fraudsters, allowing the machine to discover the laws of deception and protect Alipay's security as much as possible.

Fan Zhiming, president of Ant Financial Wealth Division, said that last year's "Double 11" and Alipay's smart customer service "small replies" had a self-help rate of 97%, and now they can handle 2 million to 3 million user consultations per day. The “Lotus Bumper” developed by Ant Financial Services uses artificial intelligence to simulate the manual process in the process of determining the risk of motor vehicle damage, helping the insurance company to achieve a simple and highly efficient automatic damage determination. Through the algorithm to identify the accident photos, after connecting with the insurance company, the results of the damage determination can be given in seconds, and the accuracy rate is over 98%.

At the 2017 Yunqi Conference held on October 11, Alibaba announced the establishment of the “Dharma House”, which aims to conduct basic science and research on subversive technological innovation. In the next three years, the "Dharma House" will invest more than 100 billion yuan in succession. Artificial intelligence is one of the key areas of the “Dharma House”. Alibaba has accelerated the pace of recruiting and recruiting experts from Microsoft Research Asia and Google.

China's artificial intelligence technology has also made breakthrough progresses in areas such as voice interaction, intelligent evaluation, and spoken language translation. According to Liu Qingfeng, chairman of HKUST, the machine translation has made great progress. The Chinese-English translation of commonly used life expressions such as clothing, food, housing and transportation can reach the level of the university and can help people deal with language exchange problems in some scenes.

The rapid development of Internet innovation has caused traditional manufacturing industries to be “injured.” With the surging tide of artificial intelligence, manufacturing industries are constantly trying to catch up with this wave. In reality, artificial intelligence has effectively promoted the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry.

In recent years, Gree Group has trained nearly 10,000 technicians and mastered the "unmanned" production of air-conditioning technology. In the past two years, the color TV market has encountered cold, and artificial intelligence has become the focus of many manufacturers seeking breakthroughs. After Changhong introduced the world’s first artificial intelligence TV, old TV manufacturers such as Haier, Hisense, Skyworth, and TCL, as well as internet companies such as millet and storm, have begun to deploy artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing.

At the first World Smart Conference held in Tianjin, Shanghai Automotive Group displayed a new smart home car. "Economic Information Daily" reporter saw that in the RV, voice questions can be obtained near the catering, entertainment and other information, the entire vehicle 24 hours to maintain security through the Internet monitoring.

In the past five years, China has made remarkable progress in the field of artificial intelligence. The number of papers and patents is among the highest in the world. Relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Science and Technology stated that in areas such as image recognition, artificial intelligence chips, smart medical care, and intelligent manufacturing, China has achieved a series of major achievements in Chinese information processing, speech synthesis and recognition, biological characteristics, and feature recognition. The world is leading in the field, a group of artificial intelligence companies are emerging, and the artificial intelligence industry ecosystem is rapidly emerging.

"Hot spotlight" hype reproduction

Excessive "deification" of seedlings encourages

While public opinion has repeatedly sought artificial intelligence, Stephen Hawking, an internationally renowned physicist, has poured cold water on it. Not long ago, he spoke at the 2017 Global Mobile Internet Conference held in Beijing. The rise of artificial intelligence may be the end of human civilization. As early as March of this year, Hawking proposed the "artificial intelligence threat theory." He said that humans must establish effective mechanisms to identify threats as early as possible to prevent the rise of new technologies (artificial intelligence) to humans.

If the threat to humanity is still far away from us, at present, some new changes in the field of artificial intelligence are worthy of attention. No matter whether it is at home or abroad, a large number of companies that have spurred the AI ​​banner have emerged at about the same time. They are speculating on the concept of artificial intelligence. Whether or not they actually have an artificial intelligence core technology, they have at least significant advantages in attracting investment and foreign cooperation.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been sought after from the government to the industry. Insiders in the industry have said that an artificial intelligence star startup company with dozens of scientists earning an annual salary of millions of scientists has an annual income of only RMB 100 million yuan, but estimates The value was as high as nearly 2 billion U.S. dollars. Some companies do not exert their efforts in the practical application of artificial intelligence, but only focus on participating in competitions to “expand the popularity”. In competitions, they use “the number of scientists” and “the number of published papers” to compete.

Experts said that although China's development of artificial intelligence has cultivated many advantages, there are still many uncertainties in the development prospects of this field.

The person in charge of the Ministry of Science and Technology pointed out that, like all disruptive technologies, artificial intelligence has a high degree of uncertainty. While promoting economic and social development, it may also bring social, ethical and regulatory risks and challenges. It needs scientific guidance to ensure safety and control.

In a case recently seized, artificial intelligence became a tool used by criminals. In September this year, police in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province unveiled the nation’s first case of using artificial intelligence to steal personal information from citizens, completely destroyed 43 criminal gangs, captured 193 criminal suspects, and successfully intercepted more than one billion groups of stolen citizens’ personal information. Seized more than 600 million yuan.

The platform seized by the police is called "fast" and was once the largest coding platform on the market. They have a complete chain of cracking, stealing, trafficking and embezzling personal information and implementing fraud. Artificial intelligence technology is used in this process to identify the verification code.

It is understood that there is still a small gap between the overall level of artificial intelligence in China and developed countries. Especially in basic theory, core algorithms, basic materials, components, software and interfaces, the gap is even huge. The reserve of talents is far from meeting current needs. The infrastructure, policies, regulations, and standards system for artificial intelligence development need to be improved.

Liu Qingfeng reminded that at this stage, artificial intelligence technology should not be "deified." Technological development and even productization have their own development curve. From technology to market, it must mature in the course of continuous improvement. If excessive “deification” of new technologies is still under development, it may lead to misleading guidance for the general public, and it will also be detrimental to the sustainable and healthy development of the industrial ecology.

Strengthen the relative advantage

Realize "change overtaking"

Despite the many frontiers ahead, the future of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly an expectation. Some experts and industry insiders suggested that the development of artificial intelligence has ushered in a “spirit” and that China can focus on core businesses to sort out and sort out, further strengthen the relative advantages in this field, and realize “change lanes and overtaking”.

George Smut, a Nobel Laureate in Physics in 2006 and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently focused on the clinical application of wearable devices and artificial intelligence. Together with Chinese researchers, he worked hard to create an informational treatment platform for acute myocardial infarction. "If we can combine wearable devices with artificial intelligence, we can make people more aware of their own bodies and really realize the early diagnosis and early treatment of the disease." He even believes that the popularity of "wearable devices + artificial intelligence" Human life expectancy may increase by another 10 years.

With the accelerated breakthrough and widespread application of technologies such as the Internet, big data, supercomputing, and sensors, the development of artificial intelligence in the world is entering a new stage. The new generation of artificial intelligence technology will bring major disruptive and alternative influences and become an important driving force for leading the next generation of technological revolution and industrial transformation.

China has obvious advantages in developing artificial intelligence. "The advantage of big data is an important advantage for China in the development of artificial intelligence." Li Yanhong believes that the development of artificial intelligence requires a large amount of data to be accumulated and trained, while China has more than 700 million Internet users, using the same language, has obvious advantages in data accumulation. Wu Ying, chairman of the Digital China Federation, also stated that China is relatively backward in terms of algorithm compared to the United States, but it is more powerful in terms of big data. Because China has a large population and a large number of applications, it generates a lot of data. This advantage is generally difficult to reach.

Not only big data, but also the financial strength of China's science and technology companies has been significantly enhanced, especially for private enterprises. Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Legend Holdings, said that at present, Baidu, Ali, Tencent and other companies have accumulated a lot of funds, all kinds of venture capital support for technology continues to increase, Chinese companies already have enough financial strength for future technology layout. In terms of technology, China's Internet, big data, and cloud computing technologies have a good foundation, especially in mobile Internet applications. China has already stood in the forefront of the world. In addition, a large number of foreign talents have entered Chinese companies, and our country’s scientific and technological contingent has initially achieved a “mixed formation” of scientific and technological personnel. These are the advantages of developing artificial intelligence.

Continuing its existing advantages, the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Alliance was officially established shortly before. According to the relevant person in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission, technological innovation in the field of artificial intelligence is changing rapidly, and market competition is particularly fierce. It takes more strenuous efforts to seize the commanding heights of the industry. The National Development and Reform Commission will focus on accelerating industrial cultivation, creating innovative demonstrations, and strengthening environmental support in three areas to continue to exert force to promote the rapid development of artificial intelligence industry.

Experts suggest that we must clarify the direction of the five major artificial intelligence in the new era. Pan Yunhe said that the data faced by artificial intelligence in the past was small data, and the data that is currently facing it is big data; in the past, multi-processing symbols, such as image recognition and voice recognition, now need to deal with a variety of multimedia, such as graphics, icons, Text, audio and video, and augmented reality, virtual reality, and other large amounts of data. He suggested that China's new generation of artificial intelligence should strengthen its efforts in big data intelligence, group intelligence, cross-media intelligence, human-computer hybrid enhanced intelligence, and autonomous intelligent systems.

While consolidating the application of innovative advantages, it is necessary to increase basic technology research and patent accumulation. Experts suggest that China can continue to strengthen basic capacity building and continue to consolidate the technological foundation for the development of artificial intelligence. In particular, we must accelerate the breakthrough of the basic frontier theory and common key technologies to strive for more early harvest.

At the same time, we must strengthen the long-term monitoring of the development of artificial intelligence, pay full attention to possible changes in social ethics, employment structure, personal privacy, national security, and other challenges, and quickly study and formulate and improve policies and regulations to ensure artificial intelligence. Embark on a safe and controllable development track.

The key to the industrialization of artificial intelligence is to give play to the main role of the enterprise, strengthen collaborative innovation, and create continuous capabilities. Liu Chuanzhi pointed out that many state-owned enterprises in China are more powerful than private enterprises in terms of financial strength. However, due to institutional and institutional reasons, many state-owned enterprises are reluctant to increase investment in science and technology with large uncertainties, which also hampers the development of artificial intelligence. . Ma Yun believes that compared with universities and scientific research institutes, enterprises have stronger research power, and they must focus on the research and support of artificial intelligence policies.

At present, the salary levels of artificial intelligence talents in the U.S. and UK have far surpassed traditional Internet elites. Experts said that there are also many excellent scientific researchers in China's enterprises. They are not from state-owned research institutes. The relevant departments can intensify incentives for talents from the field of artificial intelligence in enterprises. China also needs to plan and quickly expand the cultivation of high-level talents for artificial intelligence, and pave the way for large-scale applications in the future.