Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Author: Zhang Qi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft

In the eighties of last century, PC, which adopts open software and hardware standards and MS-DOS operating system, was born. At first, few people foresaw that PC would become a must-have for every desk and every home, a gateway to an unprecedented digital world, and a spark for chain innovation and diversified industries in related fields. In the 42 years since the birth of PC, we have ushered in the Internet, mobile communications, cloud computing and big data and other exciting waves of innovation, knowledge and experience, business models and value creation, lifestyle and consumption habits have been digitized.

When the pointer of time turns to today, the value and influence of the large-scale language model (LLM) which has successfully broken the circle and moved from laboratories and professional teams to thousands of industries and its representative application-generative artificial intelligence (AIGC) is likely to surpass every great information technology innovation in the past. It is like equipping everyone with an expert assistant. In the future, with the help of AI, there will be more exciting and subversive changes in people's work, life and communication style.

As Microsoft CEO Satyanadella said, "this may be the most important technological turning point in our lives, helping not only to define the technology industry in the future, but also to shape the way the world operates in the coming decades." "

Upgrade of productivity tools

ChatGPT was launched on November 30 last year, and it only took about two months to achieve the success of 0 to 100 million users. Thanks to its long-term partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is ahead of the industry in rapidly introducing GPT capabilities into our core products and services.

Microsoft has adopted the same open plug-in (Plugin) standard as OpenAI ChatGPT to ensure interoperability between ChatGPT and a range of Microsoft's "smart co-driver" (AI Copilot) products and services in the future. Today, from Azure smart cloud and Windows to Microsoft 365 and Teams, from the new Bing search engine to Edge browser, from Dynamics 365 to Power Platform, they have integrated the powerful capabilities of the new generation of AIGC. This integration is not simply to add an AI coat to traditional products, but to redefine and thoroughly upgrade Microsoft products that have been in the mainstream for a long time. This is a revolution in productivity tools-the software and services that support people's work and life have evolved again from "stand-alone applications" to "cloud collaboration". Into a new dimension of "intelligent assistance and multiple efficiency".

Microsoft Elephant turned around and embraced the big model to realize the product upgrade and transformation smoothly.

At the launch of the new Bing search engine and Edge browser, which integrates AI conversational interaction, in February, Satyanadella said: "this is a new day in search, and I think this technology will reshape almost every category of software. "

Search and advertising have always been my areas of focus, so I am particularly impressed by Satya's judgment-perhaps many people have not realized that from the beginning of the invention to not long ago, although search engines have made many rounds of innovative improvements at the technical level (such as algorithm and ranking optimization, real-time search, voice and visual search, semantic understanding, etc.) But from the perspective of core functions and user experience, it has not changed compared with 20 or 30 years ago: users still enter keywords in the search box, and then the search engine presents a series of related links and web pages for users to choose from. Users need to pick out a "correct solution" from a wide range of possible options that are highly consistent with their search needs and come from reliable sources-- as Microsoft Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Consumer Business Yusuf Mehdi stressed at the press conference, today's search engine is still suitable for navigation for targeted users who want to find basic facts. But for more complex search requirements, such as asking search engines to recommend trips to a scenic spot, older products are often powerless.

The new Bing search engine integrates search, browsing and chat into a unified experience, so that users can obtain through natural communication: first, a better search experience: optimizes the presentation page of search results. provide more relevant results for weather, stock prices, sports scores and other simple information, while adding a new sidebar to make more comprehensive answers within reach. Second, a complete and accurate answer. Bing retrieves results from the entire network to find and summarize the answers users are looking for. Third, a new interactive chat experience. For more complex searches, such as planning detailed travel routes or studying what brand of electric car to buy, the new Bing offers natural, interactive chat results. In a round of dialogue, users can refine their thoughts and needs with the help of interaction with search engines, so that the original vague ideas become clear. Fourth, a spark of creativity. Sometimes users want more than an answer-it's more likely to be some kind of inspiration. New Bing can generate content to help users. Whether it's writing an email or creating a three-day trip to Zibo and providing links to book high-speed rail tickets and hotels Or prepare for the user's job interview, and list the latest popular online jokes for users to do better at friends' parties in the evening-and New Bing will cite the source of relevant information. so that users can access links to all referenced web content.

The new search engine is just the beginning. I believe that soon, products and services that are highly relevant to search-such as maps and navigation, email and translation, encyclopedia and self-media-will be reborn with the support of AI.

Not only that, but from listing "options" for users to providing "answers" for users to refer to-the business model of search engines, such as AdWords and bidding rankings, may also change dramatically as a result of technological advances and iterations of experience. Just imagine, when the interactive search engine supported by AI starts to indiscriminately insert ads in the answers after it is trusted by users, such an application scenario must not be what everyone wants. Therefore, when faced with a user's inquiry, the single answer returned by the search engine should be accurate (with reliable and verifiable sources of information), objective (should not have certain tendencies, or add any recommendation suspected of misleading the user), fair (to ensure that the information will not be distorted and fragmented).

The intelligence perceived by individual users is not limited to search engines-Windows with AI Copilot is the first practical and easy-to-use artificial intelligence operating system on the PC platform. With a variety of integrated plug-ins, the new Windows can automatically generate personalized interfaces, functions and applications according to users' preferences and habits, and provide refreshing ideas and fun, such as writing poems, songs, stories, code, etc. In addition, AIGC technology has been deeply embedded in the office tool Microsoft 365. In the future, whether it is drafting emails, writing reports, designing charts or making presentations, users will feel the joyful and colorful experience brought by AI Copilot.

This will be another revolution in productivity tools. Large models like GPT-4 can not only turn search into more powerful research tools, but also empower AI Copilot to a variety of software and services that allow workers to focus on core, important, and more creative work.

The upgrading of innovative growth model

The search and advertising experience is being restructured, as is the innovative growth model.

The big AI model is not only the "technological sublimation point" that is currently in the tuyere, but also the "magic source" that invaliates the traditional "growth template" of enterprises or institutions and makes it possible for small teams to create great undertakings: we can use some interesting data and charts to objectively deduce the changes that AI will bring to the IT industry and surrounding industries. First of all, we take time as the horizontal axis, and then we can draw a curve by setting the growth rate of some world-changing products and services from 0 to 100 million users as the vertical axis. From this curve, we find that from 0 to 100 million users, it took 75 years for televisions, 16 years for mobile phones, 7 years for the Internet, four and a half years for Facebook social services, and only two months for ChatGPT-its growth curve is nearly vertical.

Vertical growth

Let's take a look at another line that shows the radiant efficiency of technology: the growth curve of the number of developers who follow a technology. For a long time, the achievement of tens of thousands of stars on GitHub is often measured in "years" and takes a long time. But this time, the number of developers who follow ChatGPT is growing almost in a straight line.

The third line: the curve of global GDP growth driven by a variety of epoch-making revolutionary technologies in history, from printing presses, steam engines and telegrams to PC, the Internet, smartphones and cloud computing. The AI technology represented by ChatGPT will lead the global GDP to grow with steeper lines.

This is what we summed up before, the unique phenomenon of "vertical growth" (Vertical Growth) in the era of AI take-off. Why did evolution accelerate so quickly? With the rise and development of large-scale pre-training model, the basic model (Foundation Model), MaaS (model as a service, Model as a Service), MaaP (model as a service, Model as a Platform) and other ways of thinking and technology trends are gradually formed, which greatly reduces the entry threshold for enterprises or individuals to develop software and services. Even if there are no experts in computer vision or voice technology in the team, with the help of large models, we can simply realize the learning of "small samples" or even "zero samples". And most of the originally tedious mental and physical labor, such as text generation, image generation, video generation, can be automatically completed by the machine. Thanks to this, in the next few years, we will see more and more vertically growing startups supported by AI, and the frequency and efficiency of innovation will become faster and faster.

Another concept that complements "vertical growth" is "single entrepreneur". "single Entrepreneur" was originally a vision and thinking framework that I put forward to challenge what a person can do with the power of artificial intelligence. and how it will change the way it works in the future: when the ability of a person, a team, or an enterprise organization to acquire "unit intelligence" increases exponentially, and the cost for it decreases exponentially, what can they do? How will the work efficiency of employees be improved? At present, with the breakthroughs of technologies such as AIGC, the timeline of innovation has been extremely shortened, and this question has been answered more quickly than we expected.

Recently, a product manager on my team with no programming background built an iOS voice chat app with search location and long-term memory in just seven days by herself and ChatGPT. Just by subscribing to the $5-a-week ChatGPT service, she has a "team", including front-end developers, back-end developers, designers, product managers, growth engineers, marketing managers, and release managers-all focused on her product vision, customer needs, and tasks at hand. If such a product is built in any traditional company, it may cost $10-2 million and a few months due to coordination, resource allocation, internal review, and administrative costs.

This example shows that a "single entrepreneur" with a product vision, empowered by GPT-4 with extraordinary capabilities and unlimited potential, can drive innovation faster and at a lower cost. It is not hard to imagine what this means for an organization: how much management overhead will be saved, how much efficiency and productivity will be increased, how much innovation will be accelerated, how much time to market, and how much business value will be tapped.

AI provides new opportunities for the performance growth and creative realization of enterprises, and a revolution of innovation model is at hand.

The upgrading of Vertical Industry and Local Market

If the iterative updates of LLM and AIGC are compared to the vibrations of butterfly wings, then soon, various industries may usher in a storm of chain change: by giving the capabilities of AI Copilot to various platforms and services between cloud and end, we are pleased to see that many industries and enterprises have begun to deploy and apply new technologies. It has been found that AI Copilot has great role and infinite potential in optimizing workflow, efficiency and performance in vertical areas. Almost without learning and adaptation, users can feel the significant improvement of multiple links from content creation, knowledge acquisition to transaction management, work result verification and so on after the introduction of AI Copilot.

Health industry: there are already many "early adopters" who are using AI Copilot technology to write medical records. As a result, front-line doctors improve the efficiency of recording patients' self-reports, analysis and judgment. In the forefront of pharmaceutical research and development, the value of AI Copilot covers the crucial process links, such as target recognition, molecular simulation, drug prediction, drug design from the source, molecular ranking of drug compounds, synthesis pathway formation and so on.

Education industry: educators often need to carry out curriculum design, lesson plan preparation, test question generation, homework correction and so on based on a large number of teaching contents and resources. AI Copilot technology can help teachers and students automatically generate high-quality teaching content corresponding to their needs, so as to save time and energy and improve teaching effect and efficiency. With the gradual improvement of technical specifications and supervision measures, "AI teachers" can be provided to parents and students around the clock, and it can also help the education industry to save and fairly distribute resources.

Media industry: AI Copilot technology can help journalists and editors automatically generate high-quality news reports, translated content, comments, etc., and help them design pictures, clip videos, and produce music more efficiently, thus improving productivity and creativity, and increasing audience attractiveness and satisfaction.

Financial industry: including market forecasting, risk assessment, financial statements and investment advice, the financial industry often has to carry out a large number of data analysis and reports. AI Copilot technology can help analysts and managers automatically generate high-quality data analysis and reports, so as to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making and increase customer trust and loyalty.

Creative industries: creative industries engaged in advertising design, game development, animation production, interior design, art creation and other work are also facing the possibility of change. AI Copilot technology can help designers and developers to easily create high-quality creative content and products, so as to improve creativity and innovation, and strengthen users' recognition and preferences.

More industries are joining the explorers who dance with AI Copilot and embrace the opportunity of intelligent transformation. We hope that local partners and customers can also join us.

Microsoft can provide multiple levels of support and help for the change and renovation of the local vertical industry: currently, Microsoft's advertising ecosystem covers more than 1 billion of the global audience, with advertising revenue of $12.5 billion in the last fiscal year. Microsoft is committed to further expand the scale of advertising business, so as to drive the launch of digital marketing, and then promote the development of GMV (gross merchandise trading value) and the whole related industry. In China, we have achieved rapid business growth in the past year through businesses such as search engines and portal advertising, and we can see that the related business still has amazing growth potential. With the update and release of new Bing and other products that integrate AI Copilot and reshape the search experience, we will work with customers and partners to explore a new service model that is valuable to search users, advertisers and Microsoft.

One of the pillars of local business potential is cross-border exports. More and more Chinese companies or advertisers are looking for breakthroughs to expand their business, such as trying to sell products and services around the world. These enterprises and advertisers themselves are paying customers in China. Through Microsoft's worldwide advertising ecosystem, the number, scale and regional distribution of their potential customers can be greatly expanded in a short period of time.

In the past, local enterprises faced many challenges when going out to sea, such as not familiar with the demand standards of local services and products, difficult to accurately gain insight into the characteristics and preferences of users in different countries, and the need for in-depth study of national laws and regulations with great differences. the construction of the global after-sales system is disjointed or lags behind, the office system is difficult to integrate with the local mainstream applications, and there is nothing we can do for different fiscal and taxation systems and financial docking. Infrastructure (such as networks) in emerging countries lags behind, global supply chains are complex and difficult to control in real time, multilingual and multicultural reality leads to remote collaboration with twice the effort, inadequate management of massive data, and so on.

Now, Microsoft can provide complete and simple comprehensive solutions for all overseas enterprises, including: first, guarantee. Microsoft ecological global coverage, security compliance, as one of the world's largest backbone network service providers, we have obtained more than 90 top global security certifications. Second, set up. Microsoft has a wealth of one-party and partner solutions that can help partners effectively improve customer experience, improve operational efficiency, accelerate product innovation, and optimize employee management. Third, growth. A wealth of high-quality strategic resources such as advertising, search and cross-border e-commerce platforms can be used by our partners at any time, so that they can draw, expand and get customers more efficiently.

Because Microsoft has a diversified advantage that can not be replaced by other companies in helping Chinese enterprises to go on sea expeditions, in the past, local enterprises that choose to join hands with Microsoft and sail around the world cover many industries, such as manufacturing, cars, games and entertainment, high-tech, education, tourism and transportation. We are always sharing top technology platforms, huge overseas traffic, rich product matrix, highly matched user portraits and so on with these partners. Especially for the capability mining and landing application of new AI technology, Microsoft has always been at the forefront of the industry. This means that our customers and partners are always at the forefront of global technology and move forward side by side with Microsoft.

Generally speaking, Microsoft can help local enterprises to use LLM, AIGC and other technologies as breakthroughs to break through the inherent barriers and pain points in the process of going out to sea, such as culture, language, localization, professionalism and operational efficiency, so that every partner who goes to sea can realize the transnational expansion of business territory with higher efficiency and lower cost.

Finally, I believe that the rapid development of AI technology will drive a revolution in productivity tools, innovation models, and local industries and markets. With the help of AI, every enterprise has the opportunity to copy and continue the story of "change and transcendence", to interpret the "myth" of "vertical growth" and "single entrepreneur", and to grow from a regional leader to a participant in global competition.

In the near future, industries from health, education, media to financial services, creativity and entertainment will be reborn under the baptism of the AI storm. Digital technology represented by artificial intelligence will provide a key driving force for the global economy to jump to a new track, and digital technology will infiltrate into the body of every industry, every company and institution. This is our judgment of the new era.

Source: Internet

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