In fact, the past two years can be said to be the key to the development of the mainland AI industry. 2017 is regarded as the "AI first year" of the mainland. Not only Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and other giants are vying to lay out the AI market. "A new generation of artificial intelligence development planning", announced that in 2030, the AI industry chain output value will be rushed to 10 trillion yuan; and with the specialization of face recognition, Shang Tang Technology, Defiance Technology, and the development of voice assistants The new wave of unicorns, such as the intelligent robot's Keda Xunfei, was regarded as the "first year of AI commercialization" in 2018.
Total financing accounts for 70% of the world
Under this circumstance, global funds are all rushing to enter the mainland AI market. According to the “China Artificial Intelligence Development Report 2018” issued by Tsinghua University in Beijing, the total scale of global artificial intelligence investment and financing reached US$39.5 billion in 2017, and 1208 financing events. Among them, the total investment and financing of the mainland reached 27.71 billion US dollars, and 369 financing events, accounting for 70% and 31% of the world respectively.
But behind the booming development, there are also hidden concerns about the bubble. The 2018 China Artificial Intelligence Business Research Report shows that the mainland AI startup company has won more than 50 billion yuan in financing in 2017, but the top 100, Accumulated income is less than 10 billion yuan. At the same time, it is estimated that as many as 90% of AI companies in the entire industry chain are losing money.
In this regard, Dai Wen, general manager of Beijing Wentou Group, said frankly that there are more than 4,000 mainland companies related to artificial intelligence, but they are able to get investors' favor, and only about one-third of them are willing to invest. Subsequent funds are invested, which means that it is difficult to survive next.
According to industry insiders, although the mainland is conducive to AI companies collecting big data because of its population advantage, the key to the success or failure of AI project commercialization must be to identify the application scenarios and cater to the real needs of the market in order to generate cash flow. It is said that most AI companies in mainland China still have a long way to go from the commercial stage.
Did not find a way to realize business
Liu Wei, chairman of Yanting Capital, also said that in the past two years, a large number of startup companies have emerged in the mainland AI field, and a number of companies in the field of face recognition, automatic driving, and natural language interaction have reached the world's leading level, but there are still a large number of enterprises. It has not yet found a clear way to realize the business, and it has become the main difficulty that mainland AI enterprises must face in the future.