As one of the three leading industries to implement the national strategic deployment and key development, in the first three quarters of this year, the scale of Shanghai's artificial intelligence industry has exceeded the mark of 200 billion yuan, and there is no suspense to maintain a growth rate of more than 25% throughout the year.
At the same time, various AI companies began to show their revenues, such as SenseTime's revenue in the first half of this year of 1.65 billion yuan, an increase of nearly double that of an increase; Baidu's Xiaodu Artificial Intelligence, which was established in Shanghai in October last year, had a revenue of more than 1.5 billion yuan in the first half of this year.
This style of painting is obviously different from three or four years ago. At that time, unicorn companies often avoided talking about revenue, and were keen to talk about financing and valuation, which triggered questions about "bubbles" and "performance losses", as well as discussions about how AI companies could enter the deep water area of industrial landing. The co-founders of one company themselves have admitted that AI that does not bring real value will eventually be out.
So today, why does Shanghai artificial intelligence dare to talk about revenue? What does Shanghai rely on to bring "real value" to enterprises?
【Scene】
"The real value is that the public security department wants to do 'one helmet and one belt', the housing department wants to supervise the battery car into the elevator, and the Land and Resources Bureau wants to pull out the cultivated land that has quietly become a fish pond or business place from the video taken by the satellite... One appeal after another was thrown out, and we were eager to come up with a plan the next day. Xu Yan, vice president of Yitu Technology, said that he has never felt the urgency of digital governance as this year, as in the urban two-level urban transportation center and various committees and bureaus.
Such a human reality within reach is also the common feeling of AI companies such as Tencent, Ali, and SenseTime that have entered the construction of Shanghai's smart city. This year, according to the map alone, it has landed in 16 fields and more than 50 specific business scenarios in Shanghai, covering more than half of the districts in Shanghai.
Yitu perceives the city's smart car, has been set up on the Pudong New Area Construction and Communications Commission Road, every day for the road network to do a "3D test", as large as Lujiazui Square passenger flow detection, as small as the 2 mm width cracks on the road surface, can be accurately perceived.
Pragmatic, become the key word in the Shanghai artificial intelligence industry at the beginning of 2021 - on the third working day of the new year, the Shanghai Municipal Government signed a contract with Horizon Group to cooperate in the construction of the global R&D headquarters of on-board AI chips and the global headquarters of the intelligent car central computing platform; in May, the Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, Pudong and Xuhui District Government signed a contract with Xiaoice companies from Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute to build Xiaoice global business operation headquarters and global commercial technology R&D headquarters. Xiaoice is the largest artificial intelligence system in the world, accounting for more than 60% of the total number of interactions in the world.
Behind the successive signings of these global-level projects, the value dividend of Shanghai is seen through the perspective of the city itself, providing the largest application scenario for the AI industry.
According to reports, Shanghai took the lead in launching the AI application scenario construction plan in the country at the end of 2018, taking the unveiling of the commander and dynamic release, guiding all sectors of society to open the scene, and soliciting solutions from the world. Up to now, Shanghai has carried out three batches of scene opening, with a total of 58 open scenes, involving hot fields such as medical care, education, cultural tourism, urban management, justice, and finance. At the Fourth World Artificial Intelligence Conference this year, Shanghai released five major application scenarios as promised, including "digital governance, Pudong leading", Lingang Digital Twin City, artificial intelligence open source platform, digital partner program and smart travel in Jiading New City.
【Technology】
Scene traction has become the greatest sincerity for Shanghai's development of the AI industry, and hardcore technology has also achieved a centralized outbreak this year after several years of basic paving.
Ai chip alone, so far this year, Shanghai has sent seven pieces in a row, each piece taken out, in the country is a heavy-level existence - on the training chip, the cloud 7 nanometer chip BI released by Tianshu Zhixin at the beginning of the year, is the first fully self-developed, truly based on the general GPU architecture of the GPGPU cloud training chip. The "2.0" released by Flinthara is the world's largest AI computing single chip; on the server chip, pingtou brother's self-developed ARM server chip Yitian 710, specially designed for the "cloud", the sword refers to the high concurrency, high performance and high energy efficiency requirements of the cloud scene, which can effectively alleviate system congestion; on the automotive intelligent chip, the release of the vehicle-grade Huashan No. 2 A1000Pro, making Black Sesame Intelligent the only high-computing chip manufacturer in China that has launched two high-computing chip manufacturers that meet the ISO26262 functional safety standards.
"Shanghai core" is confident. Just as at this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference "AI@SH Theme Exhibition", the "chip axis" composed of 17 chips, the "mass production generation", "lighting generation" and "exploration generation" of Shanghai chips, also showed the shanghai chip production generation, reserve generation, research and development generation of the power.
The algorithm report card is also good, whether it is the basic or the application of the algorithm, Shanghai has a treasure to get its hands on. Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, together with SenseTime and a number of universities, has just released "Shusheng". This new generation of universal vision technology system is expected to complete thousands of tasks with one model. With the approval of the State Food and Drug Administration, the intelligent lung nodule CT image auxiliary detection software obtained one of the few medical AI three types of certificates in China. Bingzhou Stone Bio has received good news from overseas, and its APPLICATION for ac0682 experimental new drugs has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, which means that the world's first new breast cancer drug developed by AI has entered the clinic.
Bingzhou stone bio uses AI technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of screening drugs, and orbital Drug Design, an independently built cloud computing platform, is the drug development tool with the greatest potential in the virtual screening of compounds based on molecular docking.
In addition to chips and algorithms, Shanghai-made smart products have also achieved large-scale application this year. Damin Intelligent Robot Industrial Base can be put into operation early next year, and the annual output will reach 10 million units. Expand bo, Qinglang intelligent robot hardware products, has been exported to dozens of overseas countries and regions...... The various excellent performances of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Highland this year have led the industry to reach a recognized conclusion - if the north is strong algorithms, the south is strong intelligent hardware, Shanghai is "algorithm hardware are long board, and more chips are particularly strong."
【Ecology】
Although Shanghai deserves the name of artificial intelligence highland, a series of top-level designs based on needs and pain points have been planned in advance.
According to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, Shanghai's first five-year plan in the field of artificial intelligence has been basically completed, and the first local standards in key areas of artificial intelligence have been included in the Shanghai plan. To this end, the Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology has widely solicited the opinions of more than ten committees and bureaus such as medical treatment, transportation, and environmental protection, and jointly issued the first domestic guidance on the standardization of artificial intelligence. Under this framework, local standards such as face recognition classification and data labeling are expected to be introduced as soon as possible. "The artificial intelligence industry will inevitably have a large number of gaps in the rapid development, with local standards as the entry point for the first trial, to help enterprises have evidence to rely on, it is possible to achieve orderly development of the industry and safer agile governance." Sun Yue, deputy director of the Artificial Intelligence Development Department of the Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, said.
For algorithms and computing power, Shanghai has a clear understanding, such as the "alpha folding" algorithm, which can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins and overcome the problems of biology for half a century, this key algorithm model is indeed lacking in China's artificial intelligence industry. In order to accelerate the gap, in August this year, the Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, together with the Municipal Development and Reform Commission, the Municipal Education Commission, and the Municipal Science and Technology Commission, jointly formulated the "Shanghai New Generation Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Innovation Action Plan (2021-2023)", which aims to break through a number of key algorithms in key areas such as government services, autonomous driving, industry, medical care, and finance through innovative practices such as open source open ecology and circulation transactions. This kind of plan specifically around the algorithm is probably rare in the country.
Hash rate is also a huge challenge. In the future, a single camera in a city may load more than ten kinds of algorithms such as business occupation, traffic congestion, and tree lodging, and the requirements for computing power will be expanded by this multiplier level. To this end, Shanghai began to plan ahead many years ago, and SenseTime's large-scale artificial intelligence computing and empowerment data center in Lingang is expected to be put into trial operation within this year, which will become one of the largest supercomputing centers in Asia, supporting the digital governance of four 20 million megacities. In addition, Shanghai has also specially established an artificial intelligence computing power industry ecological alliance to build an upstream and downstream collaborative ecology of software and hardware integration based on the alliance.
SenseTime's large-scale ARTIFICIAL computing and empowerment data center in Lingang.
A more resilient industrial system will undoubtedly create new possibilities for Shanghai. According to the latest news, after experiencing the global multi-city PK, all the way through the barrier, the international artificial intelligence federation (IJCAI), one of the three major international artificial intelligence organizations, has been settled in Shanghai.
Sun Yue condensed his feelings of experiencing four consecutive World Artificial Intelligence Congresses into two "not enough" changes. One is the change of the SAIL Award (Outstanding Artificial Intelligence Leader), the highest award of the conference. The award originally only had four awards, but due to the increasing concentration of head enterprises, many large manufacturers are more determined to participate in two projects at the same time, and four awards are obviously not enough. Therefore, from this year, the organizing committee has specially added 6 "SAIL Star Awards".
Second, the Expo Center, where the conference was held, has found for the first time that "electricity is not enough" since it was put into use in 2010. As the World Artificial Intelligence Conference has set up more than 100 forums and more than 1,000 big coffees, the number of online visitors has reached 383 million, and the offline field is full, the discussion and demonstration are unprecedentedly warm, and a large number of electricity demand has erupted. Fortunately, the organizing committee found the power gap in advance and formulated a plan to find emergency power generation to successfully peak.
In the Shanghai Highland of Artificial Intelligence, technology is becoming more and more hardcore, the scale of the industry is growing, and the ecology and policies are becoming more and more perfect. From this point of view, AI companies from talking about valuation to talking about revenue is inevitable.