The automatic ticket vending machine at Shanghai Metro has its own unique features. Before you go to a machine and say where you want to go, it will automatically recommend routes for you and then issue a corresponding subway ticket. This ticket vending machine It will also verify your identity through face recognition. In addition, in order to reduce the operating time during the peak period of the subway, the system is set to complete the ticket purchase without voice buttons.
What's even more impressive is that all this takes place in a crowded noisy station. Each ticket machine must identify who is speaking, extract the voice of the ticket buyer from the crowd, transcribe it and understand what it means. At the same time, the user's face is compared with the massive database through the facial recognition system in a few seconds.
To do this, ticket vending machines use several sophisticated machine learning algorithms. However, what really matters is not the algorithms themselves, but the place behind them. All these image processing and speech recognition functions are Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Owned by a cloud computing system.
Alibaba is already using artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize its supply chain, make personalized recommendations for consumers, and build products such as Amazon Echo's smart speaker device Tmall Genie. Two other technologies in China Giants Tencent and Baidu also invested huge amounts of money in the field of artificial intelligence. The Chinese government plans to create an artificial intelligence industry worth about US$150 billion by 2030 and encourage domestic researchers to dominate the field.
But Alibaba’s goal is to become an industry leader in cloud-based artificial intelligence. Like cloud storage (such as Dropbox) or cloud computing (Amazon Web Services), cloud-based artificial intelligence will connect to any computer and the Internet at a low price. People provide powerful resources to enable new business development.
As a result, the real competition between artificial intelligence between China and the United States will become a competition between large-scale cloud companies of both countries. They will strive to become service providers for companies or cities that want to use artificial intelligence. Besides Alibaba, they will , Chinese tech giants are ready to compete with Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft in the artificial intelligence services market. There is no doubt that the dominant companies in this industry will have a strong say in the way artificial intelligence is developed and used.
Think bigger
In 1999, Ma Yun founded Alibaba in an apartment in Hangzhou. At the time, it was a simple e-commerce platform. Today, Alibaba's headquarters is made up of several large buildings and tens of thousands of employees work in the company. The main entrance of the headquarters is Alibaba’s. Orange cartoon mascot.
At present, Alibaba’s core business is still selling goods and providing a platform for trade between businesses and enterprises. But this has spawned other lucrative businesses, including logistics, delivery platforms, advertising and marketing networks, cloud computing and finance. Services. The company's ubiquitous mobile payment application, Alipay, is operated by sister company Ant Financial. Apart from Alipay, Ant Financial also has loans, insurance and smart phone investment services.
On November 11 last year, Alibaba's 'Singles Day' sales of the company exceeded US$25 billion on the same day. In comparison, on Monday, the nation’s largest online shopping day last Monday (November 27th), all retailers The total sales of only 6.59 billion US dollars.
The company’s success has also made Hangzhou a dynamic technology city. Today’s Hangzhou has dozens of incubators, some of which are subsidized by government subsidies. Many of these companies are employees who have worked at Alibaba. These incubators are full of Entrepreneur who worked in Alibaba.
The founder of Alibaba apparently does not think this is taken for granted. 'Ma Yun believes that our success is due to a good business model, diligent team plus operations,' said Liu Xiangwen, director of technology development at the company. But in the next era of fierce competition, Ma believes that relying solely on business models cannot bring success to giants like Alibaba. His belief is technology.
In October last year, Ma Yun announced that the company will spend US$15 billion on its research organization named Bodhidharma in the next three years. The Dharma name in this institute is a Buddhist legendary Indian sorghum who will be Buddhist in the 5th century AD Brought to China.
Chinese technology companies have long since got rid of the assertions of imitating Western innovation. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), China’s R&D expenditures have increased tenfold from 2000 to 2016, from US$40.8 billion to today’s 412 billion. US dollars. In 2016, US R&D spending reached more than US$ 464 billion. However, since 2000, U.S. R&D spending has only increased by one-third.
Alibaba is already China’s largest R&D center, with R&D expenditures of US$2.6 billion in 2017. In the future, Dharma will triple its research budget to more than US$7 billion. This may well mean that Alibaba will overtake IBM. Facebook and Ford, and narrowing the gap between their investment in R&D with global leaders Amazon and Alphabet. In 2017, Amazon and Alphabet spent $16.1 billion and $13.9 billion respectively in R&D.
The House of Dharma covers a group of research groups engaged in basic and emerging technologies such as blockchain, computer security, financial technology and quantum computing. But artificial intelligence is one of the most important, and it seems to have the greatest potential.
The Dharma House is obviously inspired by those great business research labs of the 20th century. Liu mentioned AT&T's Bell Labs, which conducted basic research in materials, electronics, and software, thus inventing transistors, lasers, and digital Imaging charge-coupled devices and other hardware as well as UNIX operating systems and programming languages C, C++ and other software applications. Liu said that Alibaba was also inspired by the way the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded different teams to participate in the same project. .
Alibaba is obviously learning from companies like Alphabet and Amazon. Like these companies, it has released a cloud computing platform. This is the first cloud computing learning platform released by a Chinese company. It was launched in 2015. Last year A massive upgrade was performed. The tools it provides are similar to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services and include solutions such as speech recognition and image classification.
The development of these tools is a major technical task for Alibaba. This marks the company’s ambition for artificial intelligence and how cloud computing will play a role in it.
Another signal is that Alibaba Cloud has begun to support deep learning frameworks of several other companies, including Google’s TensorFlow and Amazon’s MXNet. Deep learning is a method of training machine recognition by inputting large amounts of data into multi-layer neural networks. The technology of things. It is also the most important method in the field of artificial intelligence. It can be used in autopilot vehicles, voice transcription, etc. The reason why technology companies have to make great efforts to build their own deep learning framework is partly to attract users into them. Cloud platforms, because these frameworks usually run best on their infrastructure. By supporting the framework of its competitors, Alibaba provides developers with more reasons to use their platform.
This is not all: Liu hinted that Alibaba is studying its own deep learning framework, which may make more engineers fascinated by cloud computing. When asked if Alibaba will release some of the code it developed, she replied: 'When it matures it will.'
Smart answer
Recently, Alibaba has made a lot of progress in artificial intelligence. Last month, a research team of the company released an artificial intelligence program that can read a paragraph of text and answer simple questions about the passage of text. Any version is more accurate.
It should be noted that the text is in English, not Chinese, because the program is performed on the Stanford Question Answer Data Set (SQUAD), which is a standard data set for testing computerized question answering systems. Alibaba’s The project uses several novel machine learning techniques. Its score is higher than that of companies such as Microsoft and Samsung. It is worth noting that it is higher than the average person's score (although this is deceptive, it does not mean that the plan Really understand what it is reading.)
However, it is worth noting that the speed of Alibaba's progress in artificial intelligence is astounding. The company submitted its first application to participate in the SQuAD competition in September 2017. 'Many of the top ten teams are China's top scientific research institutions reflect the intense competition in the field of artificial intelligence, said Pranav Samir Rajpurkar, a doctoral student at Stanford University responsible for the SQuAD contest.
A member of the team stated that Alibaba has used the project to improve its automated customer service in the online market. Alibaba hopes to deploy the latest language understanding technology on its platform and more applications.
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Alibaba's artificial intelligence researchers are also working on other cutting-edge projects such as the generation of confrontation networks, that is, GAN. In this exciting new machine learning method developed by Google researchers, two neural networks confront each other; one of them Trying to claim data that looks as if it is from a real environment, while another tries to distinguish between true and false. This technique allows the computer to learn more efficiently from untagged data, and it can also be used to create realistic composite images and videos.
Collect cloud data
Compared to Western counterparts, a significant advantage of Chinese technology companies is government support. Smart cities using Shanghai subway station artificial intelligence technology are likely to become China's future. One of Alibaba's cloud artificial intelligence tools is called the city brain. City Brain's suite, dedicated to managing traffic data and analyzing city surveillance videos.
There are also experiments in the Western world, such as Alphabet's Sidewalk project, which plans to transform Toronto suburbs with self-driving cars, delivery robots, and artificial intelligence-based management systems. But China has a larger scale in artificial intelligence development. Make domestic technology companies have more advantages in the global artificial intelligence field.
Thanks to the huge population base, another advantage of Chinese technology companies is that they can get a lot of data. For example, Alipay operates Alipay with more than 520 million users. The company can use daily financial transactions and social relationships. Determine its credibility.
Now, Alibaba is already exporting its own artificial intelligence technology. As the world’s fifth-largest cloud computing provider after Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM, Alibaba’s cloud computing learning platform is available in multiple languages, including Including the English version. This week, Alibaba launched a new version for European developers and companies; it also established a new artificial intelligence laboratory in collaboration with Singapore Nanyang Technological University.
In some respects, Alibaba can be said to have been ahead of its competitors. In December last year, it announced the cooperation with the Malaysian government to provide smart city services, including a video platform that can automatically detect accidents and help optimize traffic flow.
As Chinese tech giants become more proficient in artificial intelligence, it will help determine how this technology will change the world. And Alibaba will undoubtedly become an important part of the future.
William Kirby, a Chinese expert at the Harvard Business School, said: 'In the business environment, Alibaba is an important innovator using artificial intelligence. In my opinion, Alibaba is changing its business in China. Ways have been done a lot; they are ambitious in every area. '