Alibaba Group CEO and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, Wu Yongming, stated at the 2024 Yunqi Conference 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. 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.
Xinhua Finance and Economics noticed on site that Wu Yongming put forward seven core points of his own:
Firstly, the development speed of AI has exceeded any historical period, but it is still in the early stages of AGI transformation; Secondly, the investment threshold for advanced models in the next stage is in the billions or even tens of billions of dollars; Thirdly, 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; Fourthly, robots will be the next industry to undergo tremendous changes, and in the future, all movable objects will become intelligent robots; Fifth, in the future, almost all software and hardware will have reasoning ability, and their computing cores will become a computing mode dominated by GPU AI computing power and supplemented by CPU traditional computing; Sixth, 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; Seventh, people often overestimate and underestimate the short-term and long-term aspects of the new technological revolution, but it will grow in suspicion and hesitation will miss the big trend.
"We can't just look at the future from the perspective of the mobile Internet. The biggest imagination of generative AI is not to make one or two new super apps on the mobile phone screen, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world. Generative AI will gradually penetrate the digital world and take over the digital world. Most things in the physical world will have AI capabilities, form the next generation of new products with AI capabilities, and create synergy with the connection of the cloud AI driven digital world." Wu Yongming said.
Wu Yongming introduced that for a long time, the focus of AI has mainly been on simulating human perceptual abilities, such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, and visual recognition. However, the rise of generative AI has brought about a qualitative leap, as AI is no longer limited to perception, but for the first time demonstrates the power of thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
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 all aspects of the real world through tokenization of physical world data, such as human walking, running, driving vehicles, using tools, drawing, composing, writing, expressing, teaching, programming skills, and even starting a company or business. After understanding, AI can mimic humans to perform tasks in the physical world. This will bring about a new industrial revolution Wu Yongming said.
Wu Yongming predicts that robots will be the next industry to experience significant 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 that will be produced under the command of AI models. Nowadays, every urban household has one or two cars, and in the future, each household may have two or three robots to help people improve their efficiency in life.
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 Wu Yongming believes.
Wu Yongming stated that in the future, almost all software and hardware will have reasoning capabilities, and their computing cores will become a computing mode dominated by GPU AI computing power and supplemented by CPU traditional computing. 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.
Almost all the customers, developers, and CTOs that Alibaba has encountered today are using AI to restructure 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. In industries such as automotive, biomedicine, industrial simulation, weather forecasting, education, enterprise software, mobile apps, and games, AI computing is accelerating its penetration. In various industries, the invisible new industrial revolution is quietly evolving Wu Yongming said.