Artificial intelligence should be selected as the hottest topic in science in 2017. The supportive layout at the national level and the comprehensive breakthroughs in the industry mean that artificial intelligence may still be the outlet of capital competition in 2018 and even in the next decade or two decades.
On December 14, 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the "Three-year Action Plan to Promote the Development of a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018-2020)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Three-year Action Plan"), followed by Zhejiang Province in 2017 December 26 issued a new generation of artificial intelligence development plan.Beijing on December 26, 2017 also issued a document to speed up scientific and technological innovation to build high-tech economy structure series of documents, involving artificial intelligence and other 10 industries, and separately prepared guidance .
The industry is bustling and has made substantial breakthroughs in AI chips, operating systems, applications, etc. The Cambrian launched three AI IP processors on November 6, 2017, with Horizon in 2017 December 20 also launched two artificial intelligence embedded processor products.Is committed to operating system to reduce the threshold of AI Baidu, the fourth paradigm, through the smart speakers, AI phones and other specific products affect the user Alibaba, Jingdong, Huawei, Lenovo, etc., in 2017 has also made some progress.
Chinese Academy of Engineering Pan Yunhe told the "China Business" reporter that artificial intelligence is the core technology of the new generation of science and technology revolution. It is bound to promote a new generation of industrial revolutions. China must make full preparations, take the opportunity to change lanes and overtake corners.
Start synchronously
PC Internet era, almost all the world with Intel and AMD chips, Microsoft Windows is at the operating system level 'dominate the world.' Mobile Internet era, in the field of chips that Qualcomm means the high-end market, China MediaTek, Spreadtrum You have been hoping to catch up, but only in the low-end market has a certain role; the operating system level is still iOS and Android world.In the artificial intelligence era, it is another story, where the chip, operating system, application level, Chinese companies and global players are all on the same starting line.
For example, in the field of chips, although the GPU of NVIDIA has taken the lead, there are not many AI chip schools such as Intel, CPU + FPGA, Intel, TPU, TPU, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. But far from deciding the outcome, Including the Cambrian, Horizon, Vimicro, Xijing Science and Technology and other Chinese 'players' are also expected to win in the field of AI chip belongs to China's place.
Among them, Xijing Technologies launched neuron-like brain chip in 2016; Vimicro also introduced the first embedded neural network processor (NPU) in China in June 2016; and Cambrian released on November 6, 2017 for terminal and cloud Of the new generation of artificial intelligence processors; Horizon on December 20, 2017 also introduced the first generation of self-developed Gaussian architecture artificial intelligence vision chip and announced from 2017 to 2019 year by year architecture - Gaussian architecture, Bernoulli architecture, the speed of Bayesian architecture, constantly iterating on their own artificial intelligence chips.
Although the volume on the market is far less than that of international players like Google and Nvidia, Chinese players are not lagging behind in the field of AI chips. "Horizon was the first in the industry to propose to create an artificial intelligence chip architecture BPU, Google put forward the TPU architecture earlier than the horizon. 'Horizon founder and CEO, the state' Thousands of people 'plan Distinguished experts, the Ministry of Science and Technology National A new generation of artificial intelligence Strategic Advisory Committee Dr. Kai Kai told this reporter.
Yu Kai served as vice president of Baidu Research Institute, director of Baidu Depth Learning Lab, is one of the AI technology resign from Baidu.Kai Kai revealed that in 2015 he decided to leave from Baidu, that is, to create AI 's China Core. "Yu Kai believes that the AI chip at the national level relates to whether China can overtake a corner in the era of artificial intelligence, and the proprietary AI chip in the industry also means that algorithms such as deep learning are not limited by the computing power in the future.
Chen Tianshi, founder of the Cambrian analysis, 'GPU is the current mainstream, but its basic structure is not designed for AI, the efficiency is subject to many limitations.Although the FPGA iteration fast, short-term to meet certain computing needs, but the speed and energy consumption ratio , There is a gap with the proprietary AI chip.The ideal AI chip should be a new processor that can adapt to a wide range of applications such as voice, image, video, natural language multimodal processing, while far beyond the CPU and GPU Efficiency. "Chen Tianshi also believes that China's 'players' are expected to use AI chips to achieve corner overtaking.
The same is true of the operating system field.Related estimates show that although the Internet industry in China is also well-established in the world, at the operating system level, it takes approximately several hundred billion yuan each year to deliver to Windows, iOS and Android operating system giants Interests. The advent of the artificial intelligence era, also means that the operating system usher in the reshuffle opportunities.A few days ago, Baidu developed the interactive AI operating system Duer OS has been successfully selected the Fourth World Internet Conference 14 leading scientific and technological achievements list, Is regarded as the domestic market with very promising AI operating system.In addition to Baidu's Duer OS, the fourth paradigm developed by the 'Prophet' system, but also made it clear that to become the Windows of the AI field.
'In the PC Internet era, Windows drastically reduced the difficulty of using PCs for ordinary people. In the AI era, the Prophet system also wanted to do something similar to reduce the use of artificial intelligence. "Dai Wenyuan, founder of the fourth paradigm, told Ben Reporter.
Country driven
In addition to the basic fields such as chips and operating systems, innovation in AI applications is also emerging in China, and besides the overall layout of BAT in the field of artificial intelligence, there are a large number of future stars in the application of artificial intelligence in China, such as the voice field IFT fly, go out to ask, think of Chi and so on, the vision of the Shang Tang technology, Kuangsheng science and technology.
Liu Feng Feng, founder of iFLYTEK, said openly that the application of artificial intelligence in China has been on the same starting line with the United States. With the help of state policies, the advantage of applying artificial intelligence in China is actually more obvious.
Lei Jun, the founder of millet, had previously said in an interview with this reporter that China has the advantage of developing artificial intelligence in a huge talent pool and huge amounts of big data. Relevant statistics show that from 2006 to 2016, the Chinese contributed about 30% of the top global workers Lei Jun believes that the Chinese people attach importance to mathematics since childhood, good science and engineering base, which in the age of artificial intelligence is a huge advantage.At the same time, China has 730 million Internet users, living in the world, has accumulated a large number of Internet users behavior data. Di think tank predicts that by 2030, China's total Internet data will replace the United States as the world's first, which will also become China's development of artificial intelligence unparalleled advantage.
Chinese Academy of Engineering Pan Yunhe told this reporter, looking at the developed countries in the world of artificial intelligence concerns and attention, the United States in October 2016 issued a "National Artificial Intelligence R & D Strategic Planning", the United Kingdom in December 2016 released "Artificial Intelligence: The Future Opportunities and Implications of Decision Making. "In comparison, the State Department of the People's Republic of China listed" Internet + Artificial Intelligence "as one of the" Guiding Opinions on Actively Promoting the Internet + "released in July 2015 One of the key actions.
Subsequently, the State Council issued "A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" on July 20, 2017, clearly setting the goal of "three steps" for China's artificial intelligence. The first step is to establish a preliminary technical standard, service system and industrial ecology by 2020 Chain, cultivate a number of the world's leading backbone enterprises, the core industry scale of more than 150 billion yuan, driven by the industrial scale of more than 1 trillion yuan; the second step is to 2025 in smart manufacturing, smart healthcare, smart city, smart agriculture, national defense construction And other areas of extensive application of artificial intelligence, the core industry scale of more than 400 billion yuan, driven by 5 trillion yuan; the third step is to 2030 in the production and living, social governance, national defense construction and other areas to greatly expand the breadth and depth of the formation of core technologies covering , Key systems, support platforms and smart industrial applications. The core industries are over 1 trillion yuan in scale, bringing in 10 trillion yuan.
In the "Three-Year Action Plan", MIIT explicitly put forward the proposal of "speeding up the development of artificial intelligence industry and promoting the integration of artificial intelligence and real economy" and explicitly put forward the design, foundry and packaging technologies in the field of smart sensors and neural network chips International advanced level and other four key development goals, as well as in the intelligent network of cars, intelligent service robots, smart unmanned aerial vehicles and other eight key areas to achieve large-scale application, the formation of a strong global competitiveness.
The industry generally believes that under the guidance of the national and provincial planning that explicitly aims to cultivate the world's leading or the nation's leading artificial intelligence enterprises, the domestic enterprises that have now emerged in the field of artificial intelligence will be the first to benefit.