For two consecutive days, the temperature in Shanghai is approaching the "highest in history", and the AI heat in Shanghai is also soaring.
From July 6 to 8, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (hereinafter referred to as the "Artificial Intelligence Conference") was held in Shanghai, and guests and eye-catching signage could be seen everywhere around the main venues of Xuhui, World Expo Park and other conferences.
In the words of one forum moderator: "The air in Shanghai is full of AI. ”
How hot is the artificial intelligence conference
On the eve of the conference, ChatGPT, which created this year's AI frenzy, was revealed to have seen its first traffic decline, according to monitoring data from third-party website SimilarWeb, ChatGPT's global traffic (PV) to websites and mobile clients fell 9.7% month-on-month in June this year, including a 10.3% month-on-month decline in traffic in the United States. At the same time, the number of unique visitors (UVs) to ChatGPT fell by 5.7%, and the time spent by visitors on the site also decreased by 8.5%.
The impact of AI is being reassessed by the market, but this news has not affected the warm atmosphere of the AI conference in the slightest.
On the first day of opening on July 6, even though the midday temperature had soared to 35°C, there were still long queues at the entrance of the main venue, the Expo Center. A participant told Blue Whale reporter, "The shared charging treasures along the street have been borrowed..."
This situation began to appear a week ago, when offline appointments for many popular forums were basically full. As the first artificial intelligence conference after ChatGPT exploded in the world, this conference attracted more than 1400 guests to participate, including more than 80 academicians, 4 Turing Award winners, as well as industry figures such as Elon Musk and AMD CEO Su Zifeng, hundreds of forums focusing on cutting-edge topics such as large models, scientific intelligence, humanoid robots, brain-like intelligence, and automatic driving.
Both the content of the guests and the scope of the topic are phenomenal. Even Guo Fan, the director of "The Wandering Earth", said that his guest card is actually a temporary student card.
In the Chinese Internet, hot is often described as "breaking the circle", which means that the influence of an event in an obvious industry has expanded to other fields. The artificial intelligence conference is indeed hot to "break the circle".
Driven by GPT, everyone has become interested in AI that could change their own destiny.
In the exhibition area of the World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center, in addition to the exhibitors in the industry, the visitors were not only ordinary white-collar workers who were interested in science and technology, but also students who had just taken summer vacation, including many elementary school students. A parent told Blue Whale, "They all say that AI represents the future, so let children feel the cutting-edge technology." ”
Behind these "best of all times" is the great enthusiasm for AI from all walks of life.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan said at the plenary meeting on industrial development that this year, in order to further strengthen basic research in cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum technology, Hong Kong has also allocated another 3 billion yuan (Hong Kong dollars) to promote related construction.
Shanghai Xuhui District issued the "Several Measures of Xuhui District to Support the Development of Generative AI", which put forward 15 specific measures to create a large model and an ecological agglomeration and innovative application highland of generative artificial intelligence.
Imagination and reality: immobile robots and the hidden worries of technological explosions
The artificial intelligence conference is like a luxurious Olympic Games, whether it is a small AI company or a technology factory to bring their own products at this event, it seems that participation itself is a sign of "getting on the car".
It is reported that this year's 50,000-square-meter exhibition area hit the largest in history, covering four major sectors of core technology, intelligent terminals, application empowerment and cutting-edge technology, with more than 400 exhibitors and more than 30 new products for the first exhibition, showing the audience the latest trends in the fields of large models, metaverses, smart chips, robots and other fields.
However, according to the observation of Blue Whale reporters, most of the interactive projects in the Expo Park exhibition area have not achieved the expected results, and there is a certain degree of miscarriage. According to the Xinmin Evening News, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, more than 20 robots were unveiled, and the much-watched Tesla Bot humanoid robot is also one of them.
However, Tesla Bot, which claims to be able to "walk, go up and down stairs, squat, and pick up objects", did not show relevant skills on site, and some netizens joked, "The booth is crowded with intersection fund managers who want him to move." ”
In late June, many AI-themed funds fell sharply, and ETF products with keywords such as "cloud computing", "big data" and "artificial intelligence" fell first.
ChatGPT brought the concept of large models to fire, and soon there was a "hundred model war" in China. At the recently held 2023 Global Digital Economy Conference Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum, Jiang Guangzhi, secretary of the party group and director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, said that more than 80 large models have been publicly released across the country.
This is undoubtedly a high-investment, high-risk, high-reward project, but does China really need so many big models?
As one of the "contestants", Zhou Hongyi believes that "large models will become the standard configuration of every digital system, mobile phones and cars can be deployed, and they will be everywhere." The future is not a '100-model war', but a '10,000-model group dance'."
At the "WAIC2023 Investment and Financing Matchmaking Conference and 2023 Good Company Open Day DEMODAY - Digital Economy Session" on July 6, Wang Xiao, founder of Jiuhe Venture Capital, believes that "AI native applications are still in the early stages of development, and there are many possibilities for reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Entrepreneurs can look for opportunities with clear landing scenarios in different vertical fields, avoid direct competition with large manufacturers, and there is no need to squeeze into the track of large models. ”
In addition to the excessive concentration in the field of entrepreneurship, the crisis of ethics and rule of law caused by the AI frenzy has also become the focus of this year's artificial intelligence conference.
In her video message, Gabriella Ramos, Assistant Director-General of UNESCO's Social and Human Sciences Sector, mentioned that AI technology will replicate and amplify discrimination, thereby deepening social inequality; The environmental impact cannot be ignored, with the CO2 emissions generated by the large model equivalent to 125 flights to and from Beijing and New York; Large language models also generate a lot of errors and false information.
At the opening ceremony, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said in his speech that now may be the most profound period in human history, Tesla's humanoid robots are still in the development stage, in a relatively early stage, but there will be a lot of robots in the future, the ratio of robots and humans, in the current view, a certain stage will exceed 1:1, that is, the number of robots on the earth in the future will exceed the number of humans.
The increasing degree of machine intervention in human life is bound to lead to risk problems such as "human-machine control", but the importance and prevention and control of AI risks does not mean hindering or prohibiting the development of AI technology, Su Jun, dean of the Institute of Intelligent Society Governance of Tsinghua University, said in the "Intelligent Society and Digital Governance Ecology" forum: "We cannot adopt an ostrich policy, let alone a blocking policy, do not worry about uncontrollable technology, choose not to use or use less." Su Jun said, "The door of science and technology has been opened, and we should bravely stand on the stage, take active governance measures to embrace new technologies, and comprehensively strengthen the application based on ChatGPT architecture." ”
On July 7, the Intelligent Society Forum of the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference released a number of special research results such as "Ethical Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence Large Models" and "Generative Artificial Intelligence Risk Assessment Framework (1.0)".