China News Service, July 9th, since 2020, the state has continued to increase its support for new infrastructure policies, and how artificial intelligence can better enable high-quality economic development has become a new era proposition. On July 9, 2020, the third World Artificial Intelligence Conference officially opened in Shanghai. Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Li Yanhong was invited to attend and concurrently entitled "New Starting Point of Artificial Intelligence: New Infrastructure Accelerates the Advent of Smart Economy and Smart Society" Speech.
In his speech, Li Yanhong first proposed the theory of three stages of AI development. Li Yanhong believes that the development of AI is divided into three stages: technological intelligence stage, economic intelligence stage, and social intelligence stage. The second stage is divided into upper and lower stages. In the first half, the development of artificial intelligence mainly revolves around the development of universal capabilities and the platformization of AI capabilities as a resource. In the second half, artificial intelligence began to be fully industrialized, and industry applications and commercialization became widespread.
Regarding the current stage of AI development, Li Yanhong said, "At present, we are in a period of transition from the first half of economic intelligence to the second half. ."
In the speech, Li Yanhong also talked about the important role of "new infrastructure". He believes that the "new infrastructure" plan that China is actively promoting today can be regarded as the largest infrastructure expansion project for human beings before entering the smart economy and smart society. "It has great hope that it will take the lead in setting off the trend of full artificial intelligence in China.
In addition, Li Yanhong talked about Baidu's own positioning. Li Yanhong said, "Baidu positions itself as an AI platform company focused on external empowerment. We hope that every company can use our platform like water and electricity, so as to quickly achieve AI transformation."
The following is an excerpt from Li Yanhong's speech:
I would like to first congratulate the World Artificial Intelligence Conference for its smooth convening. In the special period when the new coronavirus is still in the world today, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference can be held in this way. It also shows that Shanghai is a "true love" for artificial intelligence.
We know that Shanghai regards the development of artificial intelligence as a priority option and is accelerating the construction of an artificial intelligence highland with global influence. This ambition and pattern is very commendable. As a science and technology practitioner, I was invited to attend this conference, and it was both an honor and a strong sense of urgency. Although the technology industry has been full of ups and downs, prosperity and depression, highs and lows in the past few decades, we have witnessed the promotion of technology companies for the development of human society in general.
Since the beginning of this year, the new crown virus has ravaged the world, the economy has stalled, and the unemployment rate has increased significantly. As entrepreneurs, we also have to reflect on whether technological innovation can allow humanity to better control its own destiny at a critical moment. The theme of this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference is "Smart Connected World, Common Home". I think it is to answer this question.
The reality is that when we failed to close the city in Wuhan, we dispatched a large number of unmanned vehicles to provide daily services to the people. We did not find the new crown vaccine quickly through biocomputing. We did not have enough technology to prepare for the future. The risk of counter-globalization for quite a long time. So I see that many people are pessimistic about technology, especially AI technology.
However, as a player, I know that we are making progress. The LinearFold algorithm invented by Baidu can shorten the genome-wide secondary structure prediction of this new corona virus from 55 minutes to 27 seconds, a speedup of 120 times, which means we can predict the virus change trend more quickly to formulate effective prevention and control measures , Can also improve the efficiency of vaccine research and development; Baidu's artificial intelligence multi-body temperature rapid detection solution effectively reduces the risk of infection of workers in public places such as train stations and subways; contactless meal delivery supported by the Apollo driverless system Vehicles and unmanned killing operation vehicles have greatly reduced and avoided cross infection.
I believe that in the future, in the areas of public health monitoring, new drug development and disease diagnosis, artificial intelligence is still promising. It can improve the sensitivity and accuracy of testing, shorten the cycle of new drug development, reduce the cost of new drug development, and improve medical diagnosis. The accuracy and efficiency of these will make human beings more proactive when facing health problems.
I also believe that the new infrastructure promoted by the state is the construction of infrastructure with artificial intelligence as the core, which will greatly improve efficiency and promote economic growth in the fields of transportation and energy. The construction of intelligent transportation infrastructure based on vehicle-road collaboration will be able to increase traffic efficiency by 15%-30%, thereby contributing to an absolute growth of 2.4%-4.8% of GDP.
I also believe that with the open source and openness of artificial intelligence technology platforms, more and more applications can be easily developed to benefit all aspects of the economy and society; the most important operating system software in the future will no longer be PC-based or based on Mobile phone, but based on artificial intelligence deep learning framework. The deep learning framework will undertake various intelligent applications on the top, and dominate the structure of various AI chips on the bottom.
In my opinion, the development of AI will go through three major historical stages:
The first stage is the intelligentization of technology. Artificial intelligence was proposed more than 60 years ago. In the past 10 years, it has experienced rapid iteration and innovation of algorithms. Through the empowerment of cloud computing and big data, it has gradually developed into a new type of technology platform. However, the efforts of artificial intelligence scientists have mainly focused on concept introduction, technological exploration and local application exploration such as human-computer games, and have not evolved into an industrial or even economic phenomenon;
The second stage is the intelligentization of the economy. With the development of the mobile Internet, the effective data generated by humans has risen exponentially. The development of cloud computing provides the computing power required for massive calculations, plus the general digitalization of the economy and society. With the basic environment created by the Internet, artificial intelligence can finally begin to exert its magic in a wide range of economic fields.
This stage can be subdivided into two sub-stages. In the first half, the development of artificial intelligence mainly revolves around the development of universal capabilities and the platformization of AI capabilities as a resource, as well as the two landmarks in intelligent search and information flow recommendation. Industry applications; in the second half, artificial intelligence began to be fully industrialized, that is, industry applications and commercialization were fully popularized;
The third stage is the intelligentization of society, that is, artificial intelligence will penetrate from the economic field to a wide range of social fields. Intelligent cooperation and institutional innovation throughout the society and the world will be the main features of this stage. Change will have a more profound impact on the economy, and humanity will truly enter an intelligent society.
At present, we are in a period of transition from the first half of economic intelligence to the second half. After the first half of the development, a few general AI platforms and some subdivided AI platforms focused on a vertical industry have appeared around the world. In the vertical industries of information search, information flow recommendation, and driverless driving, Artificial intelligence has also proved or preliminarily proved its potential to subvert and restructure its industry.
Fortunately, Baidu has been in the search engine, the largest application scenario of artificial intelligence so far; ten years ago, we began to develop and platform general AI capabilities as an important strategy for us; a few years ago , We are working in the vertical industry of driverless and intelligent transportation. Now Baidu Brain has represented China's leading general AI capabilities, with more than 1 trillion calls per day.
At the same time, we also empowered AI developers and industrially intelligent enterprises through the deep learning open platform and intelligent cloud service platform. The number of developers on the propeller has reached 1.94 million, and the service companies have reached 84,000. Based on the propeller, 233,000 models have been generated, covering all walks of life. Baidu Intelligent Cloud has become one of the main promoters of industrial intelligence and head player in the cloud service field by virtue of the two core advantages of AI capability engine and AI development platform. As a vertical platform, our ACE intelligent transportation engine has also become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence.
In the 1990s, the United States greatly expanded the infrastructure of the Internet through the "information superhighway" plan, thus bringing humanity into the Internet era; today, the "new infrastructure" plan that China is actively promoting can be regarded as a human being Before entering the largest infrastructure expansion project in the smart economy and smart society, it has great hope that it will take the lead in setting off the trend of full artificial intelligence in China, and Baidu hopes to contribute its share to this trend.
Baidu positions itself as an AI platform company focused on external empowerment. We hope that every company, no matter how small you are, can use our platform capabilities and services like water and electricity, so as to quickly achieve AI transformation. It will benefit every ordinary consumer.
Baidu is also the only AI platform company in China that has formed advantages in the fields of intelligent interaction, intelligent infrastructure, and industrial intelligence. This positioning can also allow us to avoid competition with ecological partners and always take openness as a basic principle. Focus on playing the role of a good AI enabler.
Whether AI can finally transition from the preparation stage of industrialization to the stage of full application and popularization, and how long this process takes, we believe that this role can play a vital role. As a company that believes in technology, We are happy. Not long ago, around this positioning, we also established two small goals. One is to increase the number of Baidu Intelligent Cloud servers to more than 5 million by 2030, and the other is to train 5 million AI talents for the society in the next five years.
However, the current stage of artificial intelligence is also a stage that is prone to confusion and even pessimism. This is a necessary stage before most disruptive technologies accelerate their popularity. As the Internet experienced in the years after 2000, some companies disappeared, and some people left the industry forever. I still remember that some overseas returnees even returned to abroad because they lost confidence, because Baidu also crawled out of the trough period. I still remember this. However, when the fog dissipated, an era of full economic and social Internetization began, and the little people who survived the winter became the new heroes.
There was no slight change in my belief in the Internet or my belief in AI today. I still think that AI is comparable to the wave of the industrial revolution, and it will definitely change every industry we have today. And this epidemic will become an opportunity, it gives people a sense of urgency to control their destiny, but also allows us to see that artificial intelligence is no longer far away, but is beside us, extending our hands and strengthening our brains , Enriches our vision and eliminates the obstacles of time and space.
The mist will eventually dissipate, the intelligent economy and intelligent society will eventually become a reality, and humanity will eventually control its own destiny.