The era of artificial intelligence is coming, where are the new business opportunities?

When it comes to artificial intelligence, most people may jump out of these questions in their minds. Can artificial intelligence make people unemployed? Can artificial intelligence really have self-awareness and emotion? Will the robot destroy the world? Artificial intelligence is still far away from us? But the truth is that the era of artificial intelligence has arrived, and it is around us.

Open the phone, a large number of applications already have the shadow of artificial intelligence: For example, if you are interested in a certain kind of information content, the platform will automatically push you such content; for example, you bought something on the website, through the storage robot , logistics robots and drones can be delivered quickly in 24 hours; for example, navigation or network-related vehicles, such as travel applications, directly through background planning, scheduling, routes and vehicles, all of which are artificial intelligence.

Today, we have invited Ma Wei, a senior strategist at Alibaba Cloud Research Center, to share with you, what is the current development of artificial intelligence technology, and what kind of model innovation will it bring to the entire business world? Where is your chance?

First, where is artificial intelligence?

1, the first is computational intelligence

The machine solves the intelligence of calculating strong correlation classes through faster calculations, which is often referred to as calculation power, so as to optimize the strategy more quickly and effectively. Alpha go and other chess applications have achieved very good results by algorithm strategy, and have already left human beings far behind. Li Shishi is perhaps the last human player to have defeated AI. But in fact, the power behind Alpha go is tens of thousands of computing chips. Humans can't do it with computing power, and they don't need to compete with machines.

2, the second is perceived intelligence

This part of the ability is similar to the human sensory ability of listening, speaking, and watching; the machine realizes classification, clustering, and relatively clear target optimization through the pattern sequence. For example, face recognition begins by marking each photo with Zhang San Li Si Wang Wu and letting the machine learn. After the amount of data is very large, the machine can learn by itself, and the photos of some people with the same characteristics are assigned to a name to complete the recognition. Common brush face payment, voice recognition in smart customer service and other applications rely on this ability.

3, a higher level is cognitive intelligence

Cognitive intelligence refers to the ability of the machine to actively think and understand. It can realize self-learning, purposeful reasoning and natural interaction with humans without human programming. For example, after reading a novel, the machine can analyze the characters, understand the logic of the story, find out the characters in the novel, and find out the changes in their own emotions, changes in their thoughts, etc. Cognitive intelligence. In January 2018, in the text reading comprehension challenge initiated by Stanford University, the machine's reading comprehension ability surpassed humanity for the first time. This means that cognitive ability has also entered a stage of rapid development that is expected to rival humanity.

These three types of intelligence are also in the category of weak intelligence.

4, the highest level is to create intelligence

It is based on highly developed cognitive intelligence, and the machine can independently and effectively create, for example, create a self-consistent medium-length novel to carry out the writing of the paper in a real sense. These creative abilities can be called strong intelligence or even super intelligence. This is the most controversial focus of the academic community on artificial intelligence technology. Once the machine has this ability, then follow-up human creativity, self-awareness and even emotion. It is possible that the machine will break through, but now, the ability of artificial intelligence, from the realization of the creation of intelligence, still has a very large distance and space. This stage is still very far away from us.

Second, what problems can artificial intelligence solve?

People often ask, what is the relationship between artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT)? If cloud computing is likened to the heart of human beings and provides the most core computing power, then the Internet of Things (IoT) is equivalent to a neural network. All information, data transmission and transactions are done by it, and artificial intelligence is our brain. .

These technologies, infiltration and integration, together create a real world, or a major opportunity for the physical world to enter a digital and intelligent form. It is no exaggeration to say that the current artificial intelligence is like the Internet more than a decade ago. It will become an infrastructure in the future, helping various industries to upgrade and change the original business model.

It is recommended that no matter which industry you are in, you must start to actively understand and consider how to use artificial intelligence as a powerful technology in digital transformation.

In fact, today's artificial intelligence has gradually shifted from a single point of intelligence to an application-oriented, continuous solution to the actual problems in the industry, and more networked ecological intelligence. Many of the most difficult problems in the past, such as the real economy, social governance, and people's livelihood services, have begun to be solved by artificial intelligence. Here are a few more application cases:

In the traditional credit model, if you don't have a credit history, your loan amount is very low, and you can't afford to borrow money. The micro-credit business of Ant Financial has realized the innovation of financial services through artificial intelligence and big data technology, and established a credit scoring system for each individual and tens of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises. It has been applied for 3 minutes, 1 second. Loans are issued automatically, without anyone involved.

With the help of cutting-edge technology such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, you can create a smart urban brain. Hangzhou has already realized the intelligent configuration of traffic lights, and the transit time in the pilot area has decreased by 15.3%. The time of arrival of the ambulance is reduced by more than half.

In the future, through the real-time full amount of data resources, global optimization of public resources to achieve intelligent urban governance capabilities. Creating a city that can think about self-reflection, self-regulation, and benign interaction with humans will likely become a reality. Imagine that the city of the future can operate efficiently with only one-tenth of the resources, one-tenth of the land, and one-tenth of the water in today's cities.

3. Where are the new business opportunities?

In the future, artificial intelligence will become the core engine of the new generation of information technology. If the data of real-time online connection has become a new energy source like water, electricity and oil, and become the most basic production material, then artificial intelligence is a brand new kind of productivity. How to use this new kind of productivity to innovate the way companies provide value to customers is a question that everyone is discussing now. Here, I give three directions:

From the perspective of the company itself, find the most intensive areas of data: including products, spare parts, production, inventory, marketing, and even research and development, cooperation, and management. You can find out whether there is data precipitation. In many industries, such as the Internet, finance, communications, retail, security, industry, logistics, etc., a large amount of business data will be deposited in the course of its own business development. How to make the previously slumbered business data online, using artificial intelligence technology Modeling, analyzing and predicting the transformation of enterprises from informationization to intelligence is the first direction; it is also the easiest direction for enterprises to start. These companies often have a good information base, but what if their company does not have too much data to accumulate?

From the user's point of view, what links have been implemented in the enterprise's products or services? What links have not been formed before, can you use new technologies to achieve connectivity? The data generated by these interactions can help you understand your users and use artificial intelligence technology to enhance the added value of products and services and create a better user experience. For example, in the home appliance industry and the automobile industry, the original user interaction only occurs in the after-sales service, but through the smart car networking and smart home, the new interactive link with the user is used, and artificial intelligence technology is used in these new links to bring the user New value; this way, a large number of brand-name manufacturing companies can also learn from. The above two points are the best way to realize business data and data business. If it is not enough, then I suggest the third point:

From the perspective of technical application, the more mature applications of the prior art include the following categories: face recognition, speech recognition, natural language recognition, image recognition, including objects, vehicle identification, etc., and introducing these mature technologies into the original products. Or in the service, for example, the medical industry can use image recognition for image-assisted diagnosis; the traditional real estate industry can adopt face recognition, vehicle recognition and other technologies, build smart parks, and smart homes to enhance user safety and comfort.

in conclusion:

1. Artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous and quickly surpasses humans in many specific task-oriented objective fields, such as face recognition, image recognition, speech recognition, etc.

2. Artificial intelligence will definitely become the core engine of the new generation of information technology. It is recommended that you find the most intensive and intensive application pain points from the three dimensions of enterprise itself, user interaction and new technology application. Early deployment and use this new productivity to achieve a disruptive breakthrough in your own industry.