Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

There is little left of the $2019 balance, and annual summaries have poured in from the tech world.

Among the many summaries of the year, one seems to be particularly crucial: what kind of AI have we developed in 2019?

Not long ago, Boston News released a report on "Industrial Intelligence-AI platform Model with Chinese characteristics". Through the observation and analysis of several major AI companies, it is concluded that Baidu and Google are the most representative AI platform companies in the global AI industry.

According to the report, from the perspective of technological openness, completion of its own industry and external connectivity, Baidu of China and Google of the United States have developed to support not only the development of their own AI industry, but also extensive support for developers and industries to carry out intelligent technological changes. And we know that platformization is an indispensable development process in the process of a technology from dedicated to general. Intel's chips, Microsoft's windows and Apple's IOS can all be seen as platform interfaces for various industries in various periods of development.

So what should the platform look like in the AI era? What are the differences between platform companies and non-platform companies? what impact will the emergence and stability of AI platform bring to the industry?

I think the answer to these questions is the development of Baidu AI in 2019.

As a representative of the development of domestic AI technology, Baidu AI can obviously be used as a weather vane for the development of China's AI industry. With the development of the AI industry completed by Baidu in this year, we can clearly see the most profound change in China's AI: the industrial intelligence revolution affecting thousands of industries is accelerating, and AI is stepping into the stage of industrial production.

In other words, if you want to understand this process, you have to start with 2019 of Baidu AI. Just now, Baidu released "key Review of Baidu AI 2019".

In 2019, Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, first put forward the concept of "smart economy". He believes that in the next decade, if the Chinese economy is labeled in advance, it should be called a "smart economy".

AI technology has changed from a discipline category to the core support of an economic era, during which the growth will be earth-shaking. The core of economic production that drives AI technology to complete this change, to the real world, to industrial standards and to thousands of industries is the answer to why Baidu AI is different.

Let's start with four keywords and take a look at the annual journey of Baidu AI.

Build the comprehensive inclusion of AI technology

Baidu AI 2019, the first key word is: rich.

If a small city wants to develop into a large city with complete industries and a large population, the first change is that small shops should develop into large supermarkets, and the quality and quantity of goods should reach a relatively prosperous stage. The same is true in the development of AI. If you want to enable countless industries to apply AI and combine AI technology with their own industries, then the first condition is to have enough quantity, good quality and arbitrary combination of AI technology.

Baidu, which has always been known for its comprehensive AI technology layout and rich open technology capabilities, a core change in 2019 is to promote a large number of AI technology upgrades, achieving a qualitative change in both the breadth and depth of technology development. This change, represented by Baidu brain 5.0, has greatly changed the degree of technology richness that China's AI industry can provide.

Today, most AI companies are still in the stage of providing several categories of basic AI technology, while Baidu AI has realized the "supermarket" of AI technology capabilities and application scenarios. At present, Baidu brain has opened 228 core AI capabilities, and the daily call volume has exceeded one trillion. In the fields of voice, semantics, image, video, knowledge graph and so on, developers and industry users can easily find the required AI capabilities and carry out personalized accommodation based on me. Such a change, so that Baidu brain from the technology open platform, has become a real "software and hardware integration of AI industrial production platform."

The richness of technology, in addition to a wide variety of performance. For example, consumers can directly experience the upgrading of Baidu's AI technology capabilities, which can be seen in the 20-sentence synthetic navigation voice launched by Baidu Maps. Behind it is the speech synthesis technology Meitron; launched by Baidu, for example, the international competition Baidu AI technology continues to win many awards, in CVPR 2019 Baidu machine vision technology has won 10 championships; international contrast dimension, you can also see the embodiment of Baidu AI technology richness, ERNIE, SMILTA and other Baidu star algorithms have surpassed similar Google technologies.

According to the "artificial Intelligence China Patent Technology Analysis report" released by the National Industrial Information Security Development and Research Center, Baidu ranks first in AI patent applications with 5712 patents, and ranks first in many core areas of artificial intelligence, such as deep learning technology, speech recognition, natural language processing, intelligent driving and so on. At the same time, Baidu also has the first intelligent search service in China, Baidu map with 300 million voice calls, the second smallest voice intelligent product in the world, and Apollo, the first brand of self-driving in China.

From the accumulation of technical capabilities and patents to the diversification of industrial scenes, Baidu AI can support the development of various industries from technology, scene to practice, and realize the modularization, standardization and automation of AI technology, thus promoting the industrial intelligence revolution.

Although a small store and a large supermarket sell things, the user experience, industrial value, especially the supporting role of life and production in an area are completely different. This is the primary reason why Baidu is called an AI platform company, and it is also a key change in the development of Baidu AI in 2019.

Achieve world-leading and industrial support for key competencies

The second key word is "industrial grade".

For example, there are many kinds of generators, from hand generators with toys to large generators that can support factory assembly lines. The gap is whether the "industrial grade" standard can be achieved.

Baidu CTO Wang Haifeng said many times that "as the core driving force of the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence has developed rapidly and begun to enter the stage of large-scale industrial production, speeding up the pace of intelligent transformation in various industries." In order to cope with the development of industrial intelligence, one of the key changes of Baidu in 2019 is to upgrade a variety of AI technologies and support capabilities to industrial standards, so as to cope with the stringent AI requirements in real scenarios such as large-scale real-time training, parallel deployment of multi-end and multi-platforms, and semantic integration of multimodal languages.

In order to achieve this standard, Baidu's many AI technologies have another important harvest, that is, continue to harvest the world's leading honor, thus indirectly ensuring the independent competitiveness of China's AI industry.

At this level, perhaps the most representative is the series of improvements of flying oars this year. As a deep learning platform with the deep learning framework as the core, the flying propeller connects the chip under the paddle and carries on a variety of applications, it is the operating system of the intelligent era. This year, flying oars not only continue to maintain the position of the only one in China and the top five in the world, but also move towards a leading position in the world in many technological capabilities. In the flying propeller system, it already has four world-leading technologies: industrial deep learning framework with convenient development, ultra-large-scale deep learning model training technology, high-performance reasoning engine deployed by multi-terminal and multi-platform, and open source and open industrial model base covering multiple fields, which can meet the needs of complex and large-scale industrial AI development.

In addition, Baidu AI technology system has completed industrial breakthroughs in a series of fields such as computing power and algorithms, thus entering a new stage from the opening of AI technology to the support of industrial AI. For example, at the computing level, Baidu's new AI computing architecture provides powerful computing power of millions of tops through collaborative design and technological innovation of chips, connections, systems and scheduling. In addition, through the interconnection between chips, systems and devices, the computing in different scenarios can be connected together to generate more computing power and achieve the effective support of industrial AI computing power at the scale and structure level.

For example, at the algorithm level, Baidu has effectively explored the frontier field of multimodal AI technology. At the 2019 Baidu AI developer Conference, Baidu CTO showed off the robotic arm "Dr. Tea".

This technology uses Baidu 3D vision technology, the robot can detect and track the position of the teacup; through the robot motion planning and control, the robot arm can carry out collision detection in the workspace to avoid obstacles; after the completion of real-time planning movement, the tea pouring track can be generated automatically; speech and semantic linkage technology analysis can make it easy for the robot to talk to people. Such technology carriers break through the limitations between vision, voice and voice, create an industrial AI application blueprint that can deal with complex problems, and let us see the future of AI.

Create the whole process penetration from development to application

The third key word is "whole process".

If AI wants to carry out industrial empowerment for thousands of industries, it means to face thousands of kinds of needs, tens of thousands of different technical levels, and tens of thousands of different kinds of scene space. And each industry and enterprise, the requirements for AI technical support are completely different. In a broad sense, some enterprises need the support of development, some enterprises need the transfer of technology and capabilities, and some enterprises need the complete enabling of large-scale solutions.

This leads to another key evolution of Baidu AI in 2019: the whole process can meet the different expectations of AI in different development needs and different industrial scenarios.

In fact, Baidu business scenarios can be regarded as the sum of many complex industry scenarios. Search, map, input method, translation, and even self-driving, intelligent voice, these far apart Baidu business, today are being empowered and upgraded by Baidu AI technology. After making Baidu products better one after another, the goal of Baidu AI is to support the differentiation of thousands of industries.

In order to solve the differential needs of industrial intelligence, Baidu combed the whole process from technology to industrial release in 2019, strengthening the strategic position of "cloud + AI". Finally, it outlines the AI development requirements corresponding to the flying oars; the AI technical capability requirements corresponding to Baidu brain; and the industrial solution requirements corresponding to the whole set of logic of Baidu intelligent cloud, so as to meet the whole process AI requirements from development to application.

After Baidu Intelligent Cloud is incorporated into the CTO system, it further strengthens the confluence and connection of cloud and AI, and takes advantage of Baidu AI to reverse create a better cloud service export. So far, Baidu Smart Cloud has achieved a leading position in the field of AI and machine vision, releasing Baidu AI technology capabilities to finance, logistics, industry, agriculture and other industries, helping the industry to upgrade intelligently.

At this point, all enterprises can find what they want in Baidu AI system, which is becoming a new business card of Baidu AI. The ability to support the whole process also distinguishes Baidu AI from other technology companies in terms of market positioning.

Adhere to the foundation of human-oriented AI

If we say that the rich AI technology system, industrial-grade AI capabilities, and the industrial system that contains the needs of the whole process AI, like the rays of three dimensions, constitute the overall space of Baidu AI. So in the center of this space, in fact, there is the fourth key word of Baidu AI: people.

No matter how complex the technology and the huge capability system we see, the practice of AI has never deviated from the core track in the development track of Baidu AI: AI is studied by people, served by people, and responsible to people-Baidu AI is a people-oriented technology system.

We can see that the huge technological advantages of Baidu AI are rooted in the talent advantages of Baidu Research Institute and Baidu AI system. Respect and tolerance for scientists, humanized insight into the needs of users, sincere communication with developers, and the expectation and pursuit of social responsibility and AI ethics constitute the core layer of Baidu AI technology.

In 2019, Baidu continues to adhere to the AI technology ethics principles first put forward by itself: controllable security is the supreme principle of AI; promoting human access to technology and capabilities more equally is AI's innovative vision; teaching people to learn and let people grow, rather than surpassing and replacing people, is the existence value of AI; bringing more freedom and possibility for mankind is the ultimate ideal of AI.

Taking this as the direction, we can find that Baidu AI system is not only in the development of technology, improvement of products, landing application, but also in training, taking care of people, and pursuing the warmth between people.

In 2019, users launched more than 350000 photo comparisons on the Baidu AI platform, and 8599 people who got lost were reunited with their families.

Baidu App fully launched the "Baidu AI garbage Classification" intelligent Mini Program, based on Baidu AI visual and voice capabilities, through voice search or picture recognition search, can help users to classify garbage conveniently and quickly; the clinical decision-making system (CDSS) based on Baidu has covered 16 provinces and cities across the country, serving nearly 100 large hospitals and nearly 1000 grass-roots medical institutions, and tens of thousands of doctors.

In terms of AI personnel training, Baidu has formed a multi-dimensional industry-university integration ecology, including teacher training, student competitions, curriculum co-construction and textbook publishing. Through "National College Deep Learning teacher training course", "Flying Paddle Association", "AI Fast track", "Huangpu College", "online Deep Learning training Camp" and other projects to train 1000 professional teachers, help 200 + universities to offer deep learning courses, provide technical and applied training for nearly 1000 enterprises, and through a large number of events and activities, attracted countless students to join the AI cause.

Sticking to AI's people-oriented approach may not sound so novel. But if we follow this clue and look back at the technological leadership and industrial tolerance of Baidu AI, we will find that all miracles have their sources.

Conclusion: the distinctive Baidu AI

Many Baidu technical experts have told me that many of Baidu's AI capabilities have heard the needs and discussions of developers, so they immediately work overtime and begin to develop and upgrade. Many things were born in this way, and then accumulated over time, and found that the banner of Baidu AI has gone beyond the distance of the industry. The so-called AI platform company is ultimately to be able to accommodate more people-to accommodate more ideas, more needs, and to accommodate the uniqueness of thousands of industries with the commonness of technical capabilities.

When more AI and Internet companies are still providing basic AI technology to integrate certain industries with AI, Baidu AI's technical system, technical depth, and full-process support capacity can already support the imaginable industrial margin and easily enter the intelligent stage. It can even be said that this is the difference between a workshop factory and a comprehensive coal and iron industry.

On this point, it is true that only Baidu, a Chinese AI company, has achieved this, which is the opportunity and luck of China's AI road.

2020, the world, this country, tens of millions of industries and countless ordinary people's demand and expectation for AI will still push Baidu AI forward.

When I look back, the world of revolution is wide again.

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