On November 21, at the 2024 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, Zhou Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zhihu, delivered a speech at the Digital Education Forum and the Internet Entrepreneurs Forum respectively. Zhou Yuan said that digital education is not only a new form of education, but also the fruits of Internet enabled education industry. The Internet not only undertakes the responsibility of network education, but also changes the education industry. With the Internet innovation, digital education has entered the intelligent and AI oriented 2.0 era.
Internet innovation drives digital education upgrading
At this year's Wuzhen Summit, the digital and intelligent upgrading of various industries became the focus of attention. With the advancement of technology and the upgrading of media, the Internet is actually changing and promoting the digital process of the education industry. Zhou Yuan, for example, said that the Internet has broken the traditional educational cognition, allowing phased education to evolve into lifelong education; The Internet has also driven the continuous evolution of educational forms, realizing three leaps from offline classroom to online classroom, and then to intelligent teaching; In addition, the Internet gives greater flexibility to the education industry, so that there are no boundaries between occupations, thus promoting the employment prospects of new occupations.
Zhou Yuan is optimistic about the positive value of Internet innovation for the education industry in the future. He believes that the changes brought about by the Internet are not only the digitalization of education, but also the intellectualization and AI of education. We can fully say that the development of digital education has entered the 2.0 stage. Under the new era proposition and the background of big model technology transition, digital education is about to usher in a new wave of development
AI will drive interaction among all things
This year is the eleventh year of the Wuzhen Summit and the beginning of the new decade of China's Internet development. In Zhou Yuan's view, the development of the Internet in the past decade can be summarized by three keywords: innovation, talent and inclusive. Today's Internet is not only a consumer Internet, but also a productive Internet and a knowledge-based economy Internet. The biggest variable among them is AI.
Zhou Yuan believes that current artificial intelligence and large-scale models are a very innovative intergenerational opportunity. Firstly, AI will greatly empower humanity. "It is expected that in the next five years, the Internet business model with the core of scale driven in the past will become a model with greater variance and a few people's productivity to serve 80% of the population."
What form will AI appear in? What is the ultimate form of AI software and hardware? Zhou Yuan said in an interview with reporters that in the past, everyone used to talk about IoT. In the future, "it will change from T to A. If every terminal can interact and search for price information for every product, users can directly ask it instead of asking the store clerk. At this point, the value of connectivity will be great, and everything will become interactive driven by AI
On the AI track, Zhihu has set its sights on the professional search field. Recently, Zhihu AI search product Zhihu Direct Answer officially launched the "Professional Search" function. Whether domestically or globally, AI search is still in a relatively early stage Zhou Yuan pointed out that AI search has greatly improved the efficiency of user queries, and this improvement in efficiency is obvious. However, to meet the personalized requirements of each user's long tail, there is still a need for more upgrades on the product side. "But I believe that with AI driven, we should be able to do much better than before," he said. He gave an example, saying that when WeChat launched voice messaging 12 years ago, people were still accustomed to using their phones to make calls and found it strange to speak on the phone. Soon, everyone will be applicable. And what we see more is its convenience, where users don't have to type words and can have conversations or leave messages through voice. When people become accustomed to using AI to search for things like WeChat, the main difficulty is overcome.
Starting from this year, we will delve deeper into the scene side
In fact, as early as last year, Zhihu released its self-developed large-scale model "Zhihaitu AI". Currently, through the use of "Zhihaitu AI" and the large-scale model application "Zhihu Direct Answer", Zhihu has greatly improved the operation of the community and user experience.
Last year, we spent time and effort on the knowledge chart model. After this stage ended, this year we have spent more energy and time on deep cultivation on the scene side. "Zhou Yuan pointed out that this specifically includes two aspects, one is to directly answer what kind of relationship the community should have? The second is professional search, because there are a large number of researchers on Zhihu. How can we make a productivity tool that can help these professionals improve efficiency.
Regarding how to overcome the illusion of big models, Zhou Yuan pointed out that from the current generation of technology, the illusion of big models has not been eliminated yet. But technological iteration is very rapid, is there a chance to alleviate it at a faster pace in the next generation or generations? He believes it is highly likely.
Does professional search create illusions? Zhou Yuan affirmed that professional search is an application, and Zhihu will provide a large amount of sources for this information - where it came from, which article was cited, and which respondent said it. It provides both a reference mechanism and a verification path for users, rather than just a paragraph. From this perspective, its practicality and efficiency are very high, and it can also solve "illusions" in this way.