three days of "yunqi" and three stories to feel where the wind is blowing in the ai world
2024-09-22
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chao news reporter ding shan zhu mei
the three-day yunqi conference ended on september 21. over the past three days, 95,000 people from over 48 countries and regions came to hangzhou yunqi town. in more than 400 parallel topics and forums, in the collision of ideas between industry leaders and technology upstarts, and in the dazzling technology display of 40,000 square meters, people have touched the wave of ai like never before.
"in the past 22 months, ai has developed faster than any other period in history," said wu yongming, ceo of alibaba group. the focus and visibility of the yunqi conference have also changed with the changes in the times and technology. compared with last year, when large models had just "emerged" and could only be displayed in the window, this year more innovative applications and scenarios are showing a booming momentum.
photo provided by the interviewee
looking, stopping, and listening. the crowds that showed up at the yunqi conference this year also changed. walking through the crowds of people at the conference, we caught sight of people from three different industries - a yiwu boss lady who came to the yunqi conference for the first time to look for business opportunities, an "old brother" in the automotive industry who was exploring new paths under the migration of competitiveness, and a developer who was eager to find the next breakthrough for humanoid robots. what were they looking for at the yunqi conference? did they get the answers they wanted? after returning, what kind of changes will this "close contact" bring to them?
yiwu boss lady: how can ai make products sell better?
this year's yunqi conference welcomed a group of "newcomers": more than 20 small bosses from yiwu formed the "yiwu merchant ai tasting group", and came to hangzhou in large numbers to focus on ai, looking for new business opportunities for their own trash cans, enamel cups, stockings and other specialty small commodities.
when the yunqi conference "collided" with the down-to-earth yiwu bosses, the scene was both mixed and somewhat novel: before this, they often participated in various commodity exhibitions, and many of them were visiting a technology exhibition for the first time.
photo provided by the interviewee
yiwu, known as the "world supermarket", is connected to large overseas markets on one end and 2.1 million small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises across the country on the other. as the global trade situation changes, they need to find ways to upgrade products, expand markets, and improve their adaptability. ai will be a very effective helper.
the yiwu international trade city initiated the yiwu bosses’ group to learn ai. “we have been paying close attention to new technologies, especially disruptive technologies like ai,” said huang xiangfei, leader of the tasting group and deputy director of the digital development department of yiwu mall group.
lu yuefang, the person in charge of dongyang liuhuan jewelry co., ltd., also set up a booth in yiwu international trade city and was the most eye-catching person in the team. she wore chinese-style clothing and a new chinese-style handbag. "we have been doing new chinese style for more than ten years. in recent years, we have stepped into the national trend. how to launch national style designs that meet consumers' aesthetics more quickly is the focus of my visit this time." the yiwu boss lady said that ai can help designers absorb and integrate new elements more quickly.
"many people associate large models with 'high-tech'. in fact, while enhancing our large model development capabilities, we have also developed many applications to empower the manufacturing and production of small and medium-sized enterprises. for example, during this year's paris olympics, a wearable armor designed by ai and produced in yiwu incorporated a variety of olympic elements, helping yiwu merchants expand overseas markets." fu jie, head of corporate solutions at tongyi laboratory, told reporters that some yiwu merchants have also added ai functions to toys, making the products more interactive and improving their market positioning.
yiwu international trade city has also grown a large ai model. in october last year, yiwu released the world's first large language model in the field of commodity trade, a "digital boss lady" who can speak 36 languages, and an ai translator who can speak more than 100 languages. with the support of these ai "shop assistants", many new stories about a sharp increase in sales and a sharp drop in costs are circulating in yiwu.
however, ai capabilities need to find the right specific business scenarios to be implemented, which is also the original intention of everyone to come and see. "at present, many fantasies may not be the 'last mile', but there are '10 kilometers' to go." huang xiangfei believes that as the "barometer" and "weather vane" of global small commodity trade, yiwu is the best testing ground for ai to be implemented in business scenarios. after visiting the yunqi conference and seeing the most cutting-edge technology, the bosses have a basic understanding of what ai is and what it can do, and can also put forward specific needs according to their own situations.
fang longfei, born in 1998, stood in the tongyi qianwen exhibition area for a long time. "now our company has about a hundred people, and all the meetings are recorded manually. if ai is connected, the meeting minutes can be automatically generated, and the company's procurement, sales business and even the arrangements for the next month can have a clear record, and the management and communication costs will also be reduced." he said.
in yunqi, yiwu bosses were shopping very seriously, and many of them watched, photographed, and interacted. yiwu mall group had previously reached a cooperation intention on "machine translation" with tongyi big model. planting a seed, the deep-level transformation of ai technology and trade may blossom in the near future.
automotive industry engineer: how to build a good car with a big model?
flying 5,000 kilometers in three days and dragging a suitcase around the exhibition, this can be regarded as the "special forces" of the yunqi conference.
before the conference closed, the reporter met jiang hanqing, director of the data innovation and experimentation department of the digitalization department of china faw group corporation. he had just returned from chongqing the night before and was about to fly back to changchun, jilin province, on the evening of the 21st. he managed to find a day of "yunqi time" in his busy schedule.
this is jiang hanqing's second time attending the yunqi conference. "in july this year, the national new energy passenger car retail penetration rate exceeded 50%, and sales exceeded fuel vehicles for the first time. we must realize that the original technical moat of fuel vehicles is no longer there." behind the data that jiang hanqing blurted out is the imminent sense of crisis of traditional car companies.
"over the past decade, the core competitiveness of the automotive industry has continued to shift, from electrification to intelligence, and then quickly to today's artificial intelligence." zhang yongwei, vice chairman and secretary-general of the china electric vehicle 100, believes that the automotive industry needs to build an artificial intelligence and automotive cloud industry ecosystem as soon as possible based on the needs of competitiveness migration.
in the past two years, china faw, where jiang hanqing works, has made frequent moves in its digitalization layout: since 2022, faw has been planning its digital transformation and developing the beidou cloud platform; at the beginning of this year, it also jointly launched the large-scale model application gpt-bi with alibaba cloud, covering decision-making scenarios in 9 major areas including research and development, production, supply and marketing.
"through the previous reforms, we have sorted out high-quality data, and local ai scenarios have been created one by one." jiang hanqing stopped in front of the "ai development trends" poster thoughtfully, "the current challenge is how to truly integrate these data with the big model in a full-stack manner, so that ai can truly empower from the r&d end to the marketing end and realize the transformation of productivity. i want to see if there is a complete thinking and verification."
photo provided by the interviewee
at the same time as the "big brother" car companies appeared in yunqi, there are also new forces such as xiaopeng, zeekr, and leapmotor. under the fierce external competition in the smart car industry, how to accelerate the "entry" of large models is a hurdle to overcome at present.
xiaopeng motors is the first in china to realize end-to-end autonomous driving mass production, which greatly improves the car's reaction speed and intelligence. however, the relevant person in charge of xiaopeng motors remains sober: "if the driving level of an excellent human private car driver is 100 points, i think we should achieve about 83 points at present."
technical problems need to be further overcome. "there are many problems with putting a large model directly into a car, such as natural communication. the voice problem in the car is not a technical problem, but an engineering problem. whether the window is open, how many people are in the car... it is different to use the voice function well on a mobile phone and in the car." said cai ming, chief product officer of banma intelligent driving.
the autonomous driving system also needs to better cope with complex environments. for example, the current development direction of autonomous driving is to no longer rely on high-precision maps, but the situation in each city is different. hangzhou has more variable lanes than other cities, and many traffic lights in tianjin are square, which will bring challenges to algorithm recognition.
the road ahead is full of difficulties, but on this road of digging deep moats, the "big brother" and the "new forces" are in step. at this moment in changchun, jilin, china faw's ai team of more than 20 people is gradually polishing various ai application scenarios. "new forces" such as xiaopeng motors are making all-round arrangements in terms of algorithm models, data reflow, and business closed loops, so that autonomous driving can become an "old driver" as soon as possible.
humanoid robot developers: how to grow the “strongest brain”?
"we used the latest large-scale model technology to give the robot a breath of 'fairy spirit' and inject soul." zhang zihao, a first-time individual developer (geek) and graduate student at tongji university, showed his small humanoid robot at the yunqi conference. with a command, this mini version of the humanoid robot can happily carry red and green "bricks" and play football in fancy ways.
zhang zihao said: "this is a humanoid robot developed based on the huaner tonypi humanoid robot using the ai programming assistant tongyi lingma. as long as humans give an instruction, the big model will translate the 'human language' we speak into 'machine language' and automatically choreograph it into actions." in the past, humanoid robots needed to use fixed instructions to complete fixed actions. being able to truly understand and respond to the diverse needs of humans is a manifestation of generalized performance, and the driving force behind it is the big model.
photo provided by the interviewee
the era of large models has given developers new creativity, and has also made humanoid robots take the center stage again. with the help of large models as a catalyst, humanoid robots have improved their perception, thinking and decision-making abilities, which is equivalent to changing their "brains", and have taken great strides towards application implementation.
in april this year, a report released at the first china humanoid robot industry conference held in beijing predicted that the scale of china's humanoid robot market will reach approximately 2.76 billion yuan in 2024, and is expected to grow into a 100 billion yuan market in 2030.
it can be said that after more than half a century of development, humanoid robots are finally on the eve of industrialization.
the huge market potential has attracted many entrepreneurs to join in. not far from zhang zihao's booth, hangzhou yunshenchu technology co., ltd. brought its latest dr.01 humanoid robot to the venue to show the audience the innovative points of embodied intelligence technology and also to find ecological partners to co-create embodied intelligence applications.
"we have been working on quadruped robots for a long time and have more than 100 projects in 26 provinces and cities across the country." li chao, chief technology officer (cto) of yunshenchu, said that yunshenchu is relatively advanced in the robot's body and cerebellum, but in the ai era, the robot's brain, including its interactive capabilities, is equally important. "we hope to find ecological partners at the yunqi conference to achieve a better integration of hardware and algorithms."
photo provided by the interviewee
not only in yunshen, humanoid robots made in zhejiang are accelerating to get closer to "people" and strive to forge the two core capabilities of universality and generalization. for example, the humanoid robot of yushu technology can skip the third subject, and even if it is "pushed" while walking, it can still maintain stability and walk to the destination; the humanoid robot of wuba intelligent has entered the factory to complete application testing, and can carry materials and scan codes to label.
before the yunqi conference, the zhejiang humanoid robot industry innovation and development implementation plan was released, which gave a boost to the industrialization. according to the implementation plan, hangzhou and ningbo will improve the supply level of key components such as execution control components and new sensors; wenzhou, shaoxing and lishui will develop special motors, electromechanical actuators, bearings and other parts. in addition, hangzhou will also break through embodied intelligence technology around the "brain" and "cerebellum".
just as developers envisioned at the yunqi conference, five years from now, robots may be lining up to knock on your door.
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