On January 10, Baidu held the Create AI Developer Conference (hereinafter referred to as the "Create Conference"). As the first "human-machine co-creation conference", AIGC (production method that uses AI technology to automatically generate content) technology has been deeply applied to create, build and connect multiple digital speech scenes with a sense of technology. The Create conference attracts the attention of global developers every year, not only China's AI technology highland, but also the "wind vane" for the development of the global emerging technology industry.
At the conference, Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li and Baidu CTO Wang Haifeng delivered keynote speeches. Robin Li took the lead in deciphering "where growth comes from", and Wang Haifeng proposed that the development of artificial intelligence has entered the "deep learning +" stage.
In addition, Baidu's strongest technology group made a major appearance with ten "black technologies". Nine technology experts shared Baidu's latest progress and thoughts in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, intelligent search, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence scientific computing. At the same time, they issued a scientific and technological ideal invitation to global developers, hoping that more technical believers can walk with Baidu to explore the sea of stars of AI technology.
1 | Source of technological innovation: "feedback"
Over the past year, the industry has entered a "deep water" of transformation, with discussions about where growth comes from. At the Create conference, Robin Li answered in his speech on "Innovation Drives Growth, Feedback Drives Innovation": "Scientific and technological innovation drives great growth."
Baidu Founder, Chairman and CEO Robin Li
The source of innovation lies in "feedback", "Innovation is not done behind closed doors." Innovation is when you have the opportunity to enter the market, constantly get feedback from users and customers, and feel the 'feedback' to cross the river. "For example, Baidu Kunlun chip is very advanced in AI chips because it has been optimized for Baidu's search service for ten years.
At the same time, Li Yanhong emphasized the importance of basic software: "The chip card neck is very important, but the software card neck is also important." Software must be rooted in order for innovation to continue to occur and to make the business at the top more prosperous. "For example, Baidu's self-developed open source deep learning framework - Flying Oar. Flying oars are the operating system of the era of artificial intelligence, allowing developers to build AI applications like building blocks, greatly reducing the threshold of AI applications. "As the threshold for technology application continues to decrease, creators will usher in the golden 10 years of artificial intelligence."
On the other hand, AI can penetrate into the industry and empower the development of the real economy. For example, Baidu's intelligent transportation solution can be regarded as an "intelligent scheduling system", which can control traffic flow through smart traffic lights and improve traffic efficiency. At present, it has landed in 63 cities across the country, and the Ministry of Communications has officially listed Baidu as a pilot unit of a transportation power.
Li Yanhong said, "Through the intelligent transformation of the transportation network, the traffic efficiency can be increased by 15% to 30%. And predicts that "intelligent transportation solutions can make China's first-tier cities no longer need to restrict purchases and driving by 2027." Before 2032, the congestion problem can be basically solved by improving traffic efficiency. ”
For the future, he took "crisis and hope" as the keyword, and drew a picture on the Baidu AI painting platform. In his opinion, in the process of artificial intelligence from today to the future, ups and downs will still occur. "All great enterprises and great creators are the same, there is no smooth sailing, only continuous hardship and triumph. Difficulties will spur innovation, and innovation is the real driver of growth. “
2 | AI development has entered the "deep learning +" stage
From the steam age to the electrical age, and then to the information age, human beings have experienced three waves of scientific and technological revolutions, and now artificial intelligence is setting off the fourth scientific and technological revolution, and deep learning is the key core technology for AI development. At the conference, Baidu CTO Wang Haifeng proposed that the current large-scale AI production has been formed, deep learning has gradually matured from multiple dimensions such as technology, ecology and industry, and the technological innovation and industrial development of artificial intelligence have entered the "deep learning +" stage, making innovation and creation promising.
Baidu Chief Technology Officer Wang Haifeng
Wang Haifeng said that from a technical point of view, deep learning + knowledge is an important direction for the further development of artificial intelligence technology. Baidu's AI art and creative assistance platform "Wen Xin Yige" can automatically generate paintings with accurate ideograms and exquisite textures, behind which is a knowledge-enhanced cross-modal large model. From an ecological point of view, deep learning + upstream and downstream ecological partners, chips, frameworks, models and applications constitute a benign development ecology of deep learning. From an industrial point of view, deep learning + thousands of industries, deep learning technology in transportation, manufacturing, finance, medical and other industries, will further liberate and develop social productivity.
Not only that, AI will also carry the dream of human beings to explore the unknown. As a global strategic partner of China's lunar exploration and aerospace engineering artificial intelligence, Baidu also jointly released the world's first large model in the aerospace field - "Aerospace-Baidu Wenxin Big Model" with China Aerospace in July last year. Jia Yang, deputy chief designer of the lunar and Mars probe, said at the conference that in the future, Baidu will have more advanced technologies in the aerospace field.
Deputy Chief Designer of the Lunar and Mars Rover Jia Yang
And this may only be the prelude to the fourth scientific and technological revolution. Wang Haifeng believes that the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation led by artificial intelligence technology will help upgrade the mainland's modern industrial system and promote the economy and society to enter the intelligent era.
3 | The Strongest Technical Heavenly Group Sends "Invitation"
Another highlight of this Baidu Create conference is the many hardcore "black technologies".
"Search has always been the largest application scenario of AI, and search engine is the largest AI project", at the meeting, Baidu search outstanding architect Gu Simiu introduced two "killer" technologies of Baidu search - cross-modal large model "Zhiyi" and a new generation of index "Qianliu".
Baidu Search Outstanding Architect Gu Simu
Among them, the cross-modal large model "Zhiyi" has the characteristics of cross-mode, large-scale and high efficiency, which can break the boundary of resource form and present the results that best meet the needs to users. The new generation of index "Qianliu" has promoted a great leap in search efficiency, allowing high-quality information content to be presented and distributed most effectively, helping each user solve problems better and faster. It can be said that "Qianliu" is a complete transformation of the search engine back-end architecture.
As the first "Human-Machine Co-creation Conference", the AIGC technology applied in depth by the conference is particularly eye-catching. Wu Hua, Chairman of Baidu's Technical Committee, introduced the talented creators with outstanding abilities - "genius screenwriter" Wenxin ERNIE 3.0 Zeus, "artist and illustrator" Wenxin ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, and "editor and animator" video content generation and editing technology. Wu Hua concluded: "If you master this content creation ability, then you can almost complete many important tasks of a film and become a genius creator. Coupled with a virtual actor of your own design, you can become a real 'independent' producer, a real 'independent director'. ”
Chairman of Baidu Technical Committee Wu Hua
At the conference, Cameron, the chief director of "Avatar", spoke to Baidu digital person Xijiaja for the first time to discuss the impact of intelligent technology on the film industry. Cameron emphasized that in the film industry, technology can work wonders. A 69-year-old actress who played a 15-year-old girl in front of the camera through CG technology, "I love her performance in this film, everyone is deeply moved." The power of technology is on full display. ”
After the unveiling of AIGC technology, experts from Baidu Technology Tiantuan also released a series of new scientific and technological achievements.
For example, in the field of smart travel, Baidu has developed the world's first universal full-duplex voice interaction solution that supports natural and smooth flow on mobile phones, as well as a BEV autonomous driving perception solution that integrates vehicles and roads.
Jia Lei, chief architect of Baidu Voice, said that Baidu has developed the industry's first software-only solution echo cancellation technology on mobile phones and the world's most accurate multi-scenario unified speech recognition pre-training model based on SMLTA2, making human-computer interaction more intelligent and smooth, and closer to the experience of direct interaction between people.
Baidu Voice Chief Architect Jia Lei
Wang Liang, Chairman of Baidu Intelligent Driving Business Group Technical Committee, said, "UniBEV has three main features: end-to-end, multi-task, multi-modal fusion perception, and vehicle-road integration, which is the industry's first end-to-end perception solution that integrates vehicles and roads. ”
Wang Liang, Chairman of Baidu Intelligent Driving Business Group Technical Committee
Huang Jizhou, Chairman of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Business Group Technical Committee, announced the five capabilities of Zhilu OS: "Zhilu OS is a vehicle-road collaborative autonomous driving platform precipitated by high-level autonomous driving technology, and will gradually expand into an intelligent space robot operating system with robots as the core in the future. ”
Huang Jizhou, Chairman of Baidu Intelligent Driving Business Group Technical Committee
The world's first independent metaverse solution in the metaverse field, the MetaStack, the base of the Xiyang metaverse, compresses the development cycle from half a year to one year to 40 days at the fastest, building an independent and evolvable metaverse in one stop, effectively solving the two major pain points of low development efficiency and high operation and maintenance costs in the industry.
Chai Xuezhi, technical architect of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Metaverse Innovation Platform Department
Baidu's AI technology continues to land in the above fields, and the underlying support actually stems from Baidu's innovative layout in the field of "two bases and one bottom".
For example, in terms of quantum computing, Baidu has specially formulated a "dry" strategy called QIAN, aiming at the huge gap between quantum hardware and practical applications, and is committed to truly promoting China's quantum industrialization.
Duan Runyao, director of the Institute of Hundred Metric Computing
In the field of artificial intelligence scientific computing, the deep learning platform Flyblade widely supports the scientific research exploration and industrial application of AI in cutting-edge directions such as computational fluid dynamics, biological computing, and quantum computing through flexible and efficient deep learning frameworks and open source tool components.
In addition, flying paddles can also build a capability engine that helps us "predict the future" in life, and PGLBox, the industry's first large-scale graph learning training technology that supports complex algorithms + ultra-large graphs + ultra-large discrete models, can greatly improve the accuracy of travel time prediction and information recommendation and other services.
Baidu Outstanding Architect Hu Xiaoguang
In the field of intelligent computing, the first full-stack self-developed AI infrastructure "Baidu AI Big Base" in China was further upgraded, and two major products of the IaaS layer were released, namely the new generation computing architecture Baidu Taihang DPU2.0 and the AI heterogeneous computing platform Baidu Baige 2.0. Through the generalization and modularization of AI underlying technology, the scale of AI services is realized, helping enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Baidu Outstanding System Architect Wang Yanpeng
The continuous advancement and breakthrough of Baidu's AI technology has benefited from marathon and pressure-based R&D investment. According to statistics, in the past ten years, Baidu's annual R&D investment has accounted for more than 15%, and in 2021, it will reach 23%, and it is also one of the few artificial intelligence companies in the world that carries out full-stack layout, and has key self-developed technologies in the AI chip layer, framework layer, model layer, and application layer.
2022 Baidu Star Competition Minimum Finalist Wang Maohua
At the conference, a 13-year-old developer declared that in the future, he would use his strength to join hands with Robin Li to "use technology to make the complex world simpler". Baidu has been actively working with global developers to lay out the "artificial intelligence + X" composite talent training ecology, and has cultivated 3 million AI talents for the society. This is the inheritance of Baidu's AI ideals and feelings.
Baidu also continues to cultivate talents through competitions, funds and other means. In the 2022 Baidu Scholarship Selection, 10 outstanding students from top universities at home and abroad, such as Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China University of Science and Technology, and MIT, stood out, covering smart healthcare, natural language processing, computer vision and other fields, with outstanding achievements.
In terms of technology competitions, 72% of primary and secondary school students in the Baidu Star Competition advanced to the finals, which can be described as a wave of technology; China University Computer Competition-Artificial Intelligence Creative Competition cooperated with China Lunar Exploration to create the first AI+ aerospace track to reserve AI talents for the development of China's aerospace industry; The topic of the "Belt and Road" international big data competition focuses on the "Belt and Road" low-resource language translation, breaking through the English-centered evaluation convention of international machine translation. Contestants 985 and 211 colleges accounted for more than 70%.
Pan Yunhe, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of Zhejiang University, Wu Manqing, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Zheng Qinghua, executive vice president of Xi'an Jiaotong University, also sent blessings to the winners and teams, and looked forward to the students' experience in various competitions, adhere to seeking truth and innovation, and strive to become a new generation of AI innovation heroes and make their own contributions to human progress.