AI's Imagination Goes Beyond the Phone Screen: Alibaba Cloud's Wu Yingming on the Future of Generative AI

AI's Imagination Goes Beyond the Phone Screen: Alibaba Cloud's Wu Yingming on the Future of Generative AIAt the 2024 Yunqi Conference, Wu Yingming, CEO of Alibaba Group and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, delivered a keynote speech that delved into the future development trends of generative AI. He believes that in the past 22 months, the speed of AI development has surpassed any historical period, but we are still in the early stages of AGI transformation

AI's Imagination Goes Beyond the Phone Screen: Alibaba Cloud's Wu Yingming on the Future of Generative AI

At the 2024 Yunqi Conference, Wu Yingming, CEO of Alibaba Group and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, delivered a keynote speech that delved into the future development trends of generative AI. He believes that in the past 22 months, the speed of AI development has surpassed any historical period, but we are still in the early stages of AGI transformation. The greatest potential of generative AI lies not in creating one or two new super apps on mobile screens, but in taking over the digital world and transforming the physical world.

Wu Yingming pointed out that large model technology is rapidly iterating, significantly enhancing technical usability. Meanwhile, model inference costs are declining exponentially, far exceeding Moore's Law. Over the past year, the price of calling the Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba Cloud's Bailian has dropped by 97%, with the cost of calling millions of tokens now as low as 50 cents. Inference cost is a key issue for application explosion, and Wu Yingming revealed that Alibaba Cloud will strive to continue lowering costs.

The next generation of models will need to possess a larger scale, more general and generalized knowledge system, and also have more complex and multi-layered logical reasoning capabilities. The entry barrier for the competition of advanced models worldwide will reach the level of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. The path for AI to possess creative capabilities and help humans solve complex problems is clearly visible, opening up the possibility of widespread application of AI in various industry scenarios.

"We believe that the greatest potential of AI is not on mobile screens. The greatest potential of AI lies in penetrating and taking over the digital world and transforming the physical world. This is the greatest potential of AI," Wu Yingming said.

Over the past three decades, the essence of the internet wave has been connectivity. The internet has connected people, information, businesses, and factories, improving the efficiency of collaboration in the world, creating immense value, and changing people's lifestyles. However, generative AI creates new value through the supply of productivity, thus creating greater intrinsic value for the world, that is, increasing the overall productivity level of the entire world. This value creation could be ten or even dozens of times the connection value of mobile internet.

Therefore, generative AI will gradually penetrate and take over the digital world, and most things in the physical world will have AI capabilities, forming a new generation of AI-enabled products that connect and synergize with the cloud-based AI-driven digital world.

Currently, the automotive industry is undergoing such a transformation. Previous autonomous driving technology relied on people to write algorithm rules, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, still unable to exhaust all driving scenarios. After training with "end-to-end" large model technology, AI models learn directly from massive amounts of human driving visual data, enabling cars to possess driving capabilities that surpass most drivers.

Robotics will be the next industry to undergo a massive transformation. In the future, all movable objects will become intelligent robots. These could be robotic arms in factories, cranes on construction sites, movers in warehouses, firefighters at fire scenes, including pet dogs, nannies, and assistants in homes. In the future, factories will have many robots, producing more robots under the command of AI large models. Currently, every city household has one or two cars, but in the future, each household may have two or three robots to help people improve their life efficiency.

Wu Yingming emphasized: "It is conceivable that an AI-driven digital world connected to a physical world with AI capabilities will significantly enhance the overall productivity of the world and have a revolutionary impact on the operating efficiency of the physical world."

From a computational perspective, the reconstruction of the digital and physical world by generative AI will lead to fundamental changes in computing architecture. For decades, the CPU-dominated computing paradigm is accelerating toward an AI computing paradigm dominated by GPUs. Wu Yingming believes that in the future, almost all software and hardware will have inference capabilities, and their computing cores will evolve into a computing model with GPU AI computing as the main force and CPU traditional computing as auxiliary.

Currently, Alibaba Cloud is investing in AI technology research and development and infrastructure construction with unprecedented intensity. Wu Yingming said: "Our single network cluster has expanded to the level of 100,000 cards, and we are reconstructing AI advanced infrastructure for the future from all aspects, including chips, servers, networks, storage, cooling, power supply, and data centers."

In conclusion, Wu Yingming's speech provided an outlook on the future development trends of generative AI, believing that generative AI will profoundly change the digital and physical world and bring fundamental changes to computing architecture. Alibaba Cloud will continue to invest in AI technology research and development and infrastructure construction to prepare for the arrival of the AI era.

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