At the 2024 Yunqi Conference, which opened on September 19th, Alibaba Group CEO and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, Wu Yongming, delivered a keynote speech, sharing Alibaba's latest insights on AI development trends and the future.
The greatest imagination of generative AI is not to create one or two new super apps on mobile screens, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world, "Wu Yongming specifically pointed out when talking about the overall development of the industry in the past period.
Wu Yongming believes that in the past 22 months, the speed of AI development has exceeded any historical period, but it is still in the early stages of AGI transformation.
Firstly, the rapid iteration of large model technology greatly improves the usability of the technology. The large model already possesses multimodal capabilities of text, speech, and vision, and can begin to complete complex instructions. Last year, big models could only help programmers write simple code, but today they can directly understand requirements and complete complex programming tasks; Last year, the mathematical ability of big models was only at the level of middle school students. Today, it has reached the gold medal level of international Olympic competitions and is close to the doctoral level in physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines.
At the same time, the cost of model inference has exponentially decreased, far exceeding Moore's Law. In the past year, the call price of Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba Cloud Bailian has dropped by 97%, and the lowest cost of calling one million tokens has been reduced to 50 cents. Inference cost is the key issue that has caused the outbreak of applications, and Alibaba Cloud will strive to continue to reduce costs, "said Wu Yongming.
In addition, the open-source ecosystem is thriving. It is reported that in June of this year, Tongyi Qianwen's open-source Qwen2 quickly topped Huggingface's global open-source model ranking. On Huggingface, Qwen has nearly 50000 native and derivative models, ranking second in the world. There are over 10000 models on the Alibaba Cloud Magic Community, serving over 6.9 million developers.
However, Wu Yongming stated that all of this is just beginning. To achieve true AGI, the next generation of models will need to have a larger, more general, and more generalized knowledge system, as well as more complex and multi-level logical reasoning capabilities. The investment threshold for advanced model competition worldwide will reach the level of billions or tens of billions of dollars.
Regarding the huge imagination and landing space of AI that has been hotly discussed in the industry, Wu Yongming gave Alibaba's judgment, "We believe that the greatest imagination of AI is definitely not on mobile screens. The greatest imagination of AI is to infiltrate the digital world, take over the digital world, and change the physical world.
We can't just look at the future from the perspective of mobile Internet. The greatest imagination of generative AI is not to create one or two new super apps on mobile screens, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world.
"In the past three decades, the essence of the Internet wave is connectivity. The Internet has connected people, information, commerce and factories. Through connectivity, the world's collaboration efficiency has been improved, huge value has been created, and people's lifestyle has been changed. Generative AI creates new value through the supply of productivity, thus creating greater internal value for the world, that is, the productivity level of the whole world has been improved. This value creation may be ten times or dozens of times the value of mobile Internet connectivity." Wu Yongming said.
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 cloud based AI driven digital world to generate synergies, "said Wu Yongming.
In Wu Yongming's view, generative AI has given the world a unified language - Token. It can be any text, code, image, video, sound, or human thought for thousands of years. AI models can understand various aspects of the real world through tokenization of physical world data, such as human walking, running, driving vehicles, using tools, painting, composing, writing, expressing, teaching, programming skills, and even starting a company. After understanding, AI can mimic humans to perform tasks in the physical world. This will bring about a new industrial revolution.
Robots will be the next industry to experience tremendous changes. In the future, all movable objects will become intelligent robots. It can be a robotic arm in a factory, a crane on a construction site, a porter in a warehouse, a firefighter on a firefighting site, including pet dogs, nannies, and assistants at home.
In the future, there will be many robots in factories. Under the command of AI big models, there will now be one or two cars in every city household, and in the future, each household may have two or three robots to help people improve efficiency in their lives.
It can be imagined that the AI driven digital world is connected to the physical world with AI capabilities, which will greatly enhance the productivity of the entire world and have a revolutionary impact on the operational efficiency of the physical world.
AI computing is accelerating its evolution and becoming the dominant force in computing systems. The process of AI taking over the digital world has already triggered changes in the computing power market. Wu Yongming specifically pointed out that both end-to-end computing and cloud based worlds are very obvious trends.
In the new computing power market, over 50% of new demand is driven by AI, and AI computing power demand has already taken the mainstream position. This trend will continue to expand. In the past year, Alibaba Cloud has invested in building a large amount of AI computing power, but it still falls far short of meeting the strong demand from customers Alibaba Cloud is investing in AI technology research and infrastructure construction with unprecedented intensity. The single network cluster has expanded to the 100000 card level and is rebuilding advanced AI infrastructure for the future in various aspects such as chips, servers, networks, storage, heat dissipation, power supply, and data centers
From historical experience, people often overestimate and underestimate the new technological revolution in the short term and in the long term. Because in the early stages of new technology application, the penetration rate was relatively low, and such events had not occurred in people's experience, most people's instincts would have doubts, which is normal. However, the new technological revolution will grow in people's doubts, causing many people to miss out in hesitation, "said Wu Yongming.