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on september 19, wu yongming, ceo of alibaba group and chairman and ceo of alibaba cloud intelligence group, delivered a keynote speech at the 2024 yunqi conference.

he said that in the past year, alibaba cloud has invested in building a large amount of ai computing power, but it is still far from meeting the strong demand of customers. in the future, almost all software and hardware will have reasoning capabilities, and their computing cores will become a computing model with gpu ai computing power as the main and cpu traditional computing as the auxiliary. robotics will be the next industry to usher in a huge change. in the future, all movable objects will become intelligent robots. the investment threshold for advanced models in the next stage will be at the level of tens of billions or hundreds of billions of us dollars.

"people tend to overestimate the new technological revolution in the short term and underestimate it in the long term, but it will grow in your doubts and you will miss the big trend in your hesitation." wu yongming said that in the past 22 months, the speed of ai development has exceeded any historical period, but we are still in the early stages of agi transformation. the biggest imagination of generative ai is not to create one or two new super apps on the mobile phone screen, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world.

attached is the full text of the speech:

welcome to the 2024 yunqi conference. this past summer, alibaba cloud fully supported the paris olympics and achieved a historic breakthrough. for the first time, cloud computing surpassed satellites and became the main broadcasting method for the olympics. ai was also widely used in the olympics for the first time. today, the focus of the yunqi conference is also ai. i will mainly share three points:

first, ai has advanced faster in the past 22 months than in any other period in history, but we are still in the early stages of the agi revolution.

the big model technology is rapidly iterating, and the usability of the technology has been greatly improved. the big model already has multi-modal capabilities of text, voice, and vision, and can begin to complete complex instructions. last year, the big model could only help programmers write simple code, but today it can directly understand the requirements and complete complex programming tasks. last year, the mathematical ability of the big model was only at the level of a middle school student, but today it has reached the gold medal level of the international mathematical olympiad, and is close to the doctoral level in many disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology.

at the same time, the cost of model inference has dropped exponentially, far exceeding moore's law. over the past year, the price of calling tongyi qianwen api on alibaba cloud bailian has dropped by 97%, and the lowest cost of calling a million tokens has dropped to 0.5 cents. inference cost is a key issue for application explosion, and alibaba cloud will work hard to continue to reduce costs.

the open source ecosystem is booming. in june this year, tongyi qianwen open-sourced qwen2, which quickly topped the global open source model rankings on huggingface. on huggingface, qwen has nearly 50,000 native and derivative models, ranking second in the world. alibaba cloud moda community has more than 10,000 models and serves more than 6.9 million developers.

all this has just begun. to achieve true agi, the next generation of models needs to have a larger, more generalized knowledge system, and will also have more complex and multi-level logical reasoning capabilities. the investment threshold for the global advanced model competition will reach billions or tens of billions of dollars. the path of ai's creativity and ability to help humans solve complex problems is clear, and it also opens up the possibility of ai's widespread application in various industry scenarios.

second, ai’s greatest imagination is not on the mobile phone screen, but in taking over the digital world and changing the physical world.

today, many people in the industry have been thinking about what the biggest application of ai is, and may have been thinking about what super apps are innovative in the ai ​​era on mobile phones. but we believe that the biggest imagination of ai is definitely not on the mobile phone screen. the biggest imagination of ai is to penetrate the digital world, take over the digital world, and change the physical world. this is the biggest imagination of ai.

we cannot just look at the future from the perspective of mobile internet. the biggest imagination of generative ai is not to create one or two new super apps on the mobile phone screen, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world.

over the past three decades, the essence of the internet wave is connection. the internet connects people, information, businesses and factories. through connection, it improves the efficiency of global collaboration, creates huge value and changes people's lifestyles. however, generative ai creates new value through the supply of productivity, thereby creating greater intrinsic value for the world, that is, it improves the productivity level of the entire world as a whole. this kind of value creation may be ten or even dozens of times the value of mobile internet connections.

we believe that generative ai will gradually penetrate the digital world and take over the digital world. most things in the physical world will have ai capabilities, forming the next generation of new products with ai capabilities, and connecting with the digital world driven by cloud ai to create synergistic effects.

for a long time, the focus of ai has been on simulating human perception, such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, and visual recognition. however, the rise of generative ai has brought about a qualitative leap. ai is no longer limited to perception, but has demonstrated the power of thinking, reasoning, and creation for the first time.

generative ai gives the world a unified language - token. it can be any text, code, image, video, sound, or human thinking over thousands of years. ai models can understand all aspects of the real world by tokenizing physical world data, such as human walking, running, driving, using tools, painting, composing, writing, expressing, teaching, programming skills, and even starting a company. after understanding, ai can imitate humans to perform tasks in the physical world. this will bring about a new industrial revolution.

we see that such a change is happening in the automotive industry. previous autonomous driving technology relied on people to write algorithm rules, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code still could not exhaust all driving scenarios. after adopting the "end-to-end" large model technology training, the ai ​​model directly learns from massive human driving visual data, allowing the car to have driving capabilities that surpass most drivers.

robotics will be the next industry to undergo a huge change. in the future, all movable objects will become intelligent robots. they can be mechanical arms in factories, cranes on construction sites, porters in warehouses, firefighters at fire scenes, and even pet dogs, nannies, and assistants in families.

in the future, there will be many robots in factories, producing robots under the command of ai models. now every urban family has one or two cars, and in the future every family may have two or three robots to help people improve the efficiency of their lives.

it can be imagined that the ai-driven digital world connected to the physical world with ai capabilities will greatly improve the productivity of the entire world and have a revolutionary impact on the operating efficiency of the physical world.

third, ai computing is evolving at an accelerated pace and becoming the dominant computing system.

whether we see computing on the edge or in the cloud, this is a very obvious trend. generative ai's reconstruction of the digital and physical worlds will bring about fundamental changes in computing architecture. in the past few decades, the cpu-dominated computing system is accelerating the transition to the gpu-dominated ai computing system. in the future, almost all software and hardware will have reasoning capabilities, and their computing cores will become a computing mode with gpu ai computing power as the main and cpu traditional computing as the auxiliary.

we have seen that in the new computing power market, more than 50% of the new demand is driven by ai, and ai computing power demand has become the mainstream. this trend will continue to expand. in the past year, alibaba cloud has invested in a large amount of new ai computing power, but it is still far from meeting the strong demand of customers.

almost all the customers, developers, and ctos we meet today are using ai to reconstruct their products. a large number of new demands are being driven by gpu computing power, and a large number of existing applications are also being rewritten with gpus. ai computing is accelerating its penetration in industries such as automobiles, biomedicine, industrial simulation, weather forecasting, education, enterprise software, mobile apps, and games. in all walks of life, the invisible new industrial revolution is quietly evolving.

all industries require infrastructure with stronger performance, larger scale, and better adaptability to ai needs.

alibaba cloud is investing in ai technology r&d and infrastructure construction with unprecedented intensity. our single network cluster has expanded to 100,000 cards, and we are rebuilding the future-oriented ai advanced infrastructure from chips, servers, networks, storage to heat dissipation, power supply, data centers, and other aspects.

from historical experience, people tend to overestimate new technology revolutions in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. because in the early stages of new technology application, the penetration rate is still relatively low, and people have no experience of such events, most people will instinctively doubt it, which is normal. however, the new technology revolution will grow amid people's doubts, causing many people to miss out in hesitation.

standing at the beginning of the ai ​​era, i feel extremely excited. today, we have invited entrepreneurs and scientists in the three fields of big models, autonomous driving and robotics. they are rushing to reconstruct our world with ai, and we look forward to their wonderful sharing.

thank you all. i hope you all have a fulfilling and enjoyable time in yunqi.

source: chao news reporter zhang yunshan zhu yao mao weixing