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"ai's greatest imagination is not to create one or two new super apps on mobile phone screens, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world." one year after taking over as ceo of alibaba and chairman and ceo of alibaba cloud, wu yongming became the undisputed protagonist of the yunqi conference. even more high-profile than his personal profile is wu yongming's assertion, a reflection on the future form of ai.

since mobile phones, especially smartphones, have become the most important terminals for humans, the other side of their coverage of people’s lives and work is the “monopoly” of technology implementation and industrial ecology.

in the past two decades, marked by the "iphone moment", almost all killer network technologies and products have used mobile phones as the main carrier and super apps as the main form, and other scenarios such as computers, tablets, and car computers have done nothing more than adaptation.

wechat, tiktok, didi, meituan... all benefit from the dominance of mobile phones, not to mention hardware manufacturers such as xiaomi, huawei, and apple from terminals to systems.

no wonder lei jun, chairman of xiaomi, judged in 2011 that "mobile internet is ten times larger than pc internet" - he waved the flag and shouted, and he entered the game and made a big bet.

kai-fu lee was once a leader in the mobile internet. by 2023, he upgraded his judgment to "the big model is a platform revolution that is ten times or even greater than the mobile internet."

which terminal will carry the ai ​​revolution? the heavy burden falls on mobile phones. after all, other terminals such as smart glasses, virtual reality headsets, smart tvs, and car computers are either still struggling or have limited usage scenarios.

in recent years, ai has been constantly developing new concepts in various sub-fields. when visual ai was popular, everyone tried face recognition to change faces; when voice ai was popular, the competition was fierce between "xiaoai xiaodu"; large models became popular overnight, and the battle of thousands of models or mobile app battles...

fortunately, due to their unique properties, intelligent driving systems and autonomous driving have taken a path that does not rely on mobile phones. however, many car manufacturers, such as weilai and geely, are still obsessed with making mobile phones.

wu yongming’s appeal is not without reason. mobile phones are a shortcut to the popularization of ai, but also a burden to the explosion of ai.

at the world artificial intelligence conference in july this year, baidu ceo robin li expressed a similar view: we must avoid falling into the "super app trap" and think that only an app with 1 billion daily active users can be considered successful. this is the thinking logic of the mobile era, but in the ai ​​era, the rules may not be the same. "super-capable" applications are more important than "super apps."

not relying on super apps or mobile phones is certainly the attitude of large platform companies. alibaba and baidu hope to become the leaders in the ai ​​era, and also hope to gather millions of developers - the terminals are becoming more dispersed, and the ecology is becoming broader and more balanced.

transformation is difficult. in the fierce competition, no company dares to give up the opportunity of "ai super app" even if it is based on mobile phones and is confined to mobile phones.

on september 20, apple's new iphone 16 was officially released. what people are most concerned about is its ai capability, namely the apple intelligence function. after a roundabout way, the world's mobile phones look to apple, and apple ai looks to the iphone.

breaking through the limitations of terminals and making each terminal an intelligent hub has been a high priority since the rise of the internet of things. today, the number of connected devices in the internet of things far exceeds that of smartphones and computers, but the latter two still control the central position.

perhaps, the accelerated evolution of ai can make up for the shortcoming of the internet of things being big but not strong.

beijing business daily commentator zhang xuwang