The people at Ali's booth next door seem to be no less than ours. ”
SenseTime actually moved a basketball hoop, and installed a screen on the back of the booth to attract the audience, what a chicken thief. ”
With our (Baidu) strength and passenger flow, it can be regarded as the ssssvip of this conference... ”
At nine o'clock in the morning, when most of the colleagues in the editorial department had not yet woken up, the bad critic heard the fragmentary thoughts of the employees of these large factories above at the exhibition site.
And what makes the big manufacturers intrigue and even play "tricks" is not anything else, but the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
Let's just say that as one of the top AI events in China, WAIC is often known as the vane of the global AI industry, highlighting a large amount of saturation, big guys gathered, and even gave birth to many "world famous paintings".
For example, the famous scene of two horses on the same stage came from WAIC in 2019.
In the context of the outbreak of AI large models, this year's WAIC has attracted much attention, you may not believe it, this year's conference alone large models, more than thirty unveiled.
In addition, more than 400 exhibitors and more than 80 domestic and foreign academicians participated.
Including Tesla CEO Musk, AMD CEO Su Zifeng, Huawei rotating chairman Ken Hu, "father of convolutional neural networks" Yang Likun (Yann LeCun), IEEE CEO Raman and other industry and academic bigwigs with heads and faces, also showed their faces at this conference.
If nothing else, during the admission stage, WAIC gave the bad reviewers some small shocks.
The long queue in the morning also made the grandpa and aunt who were walking nearby stunned.
Fortunately, during the queue, everyone became social...
Look at the clothes, you are from Xinhuasan, I am from Yunmai Xinlian. "Yes, I'm a new H3C, we're a partner, let's add a WeChat." ”
Similar conversations happened several times around the bad critics, and during the small talk and "eavesdropping" on other people's small talk, everyone quickly entered the scene.
And this conference, the most intuitive feeling for the bad critics is that although compared with a few months ago, the people's bullshitch about AI has cooled down a bit.
But from the perspective of the industry, AI is still the hottest topic, and AI manufacturers are frantically rolling in and trying to land, and AI is indeed changing thousands of industries.
First of all, just like those broken thoughts that the bad commentator "overheard" at the beginning of the article, it was a coincidence... Baidu, Ali, Tencent and SenseTime gathered together, and the smell of gunpowder rushed straight to the nose.
SenseTime, which is called "chicken thief" by friendly businessmen, may indeed be "little sunspots" because they moved to a smart basketball court.
Specifically, SenseTime's visual large model and multiple cameras form a visual motion capture system.
Whether it is the capture of highlight moments, the generation of wonderful moments, technical data statistics, or the live broadcast of events, etc., they can be automatically completed by this system.
Anyway, the colleague in charge of the live broadcast said to the bad critic on the side: "The director will be unemployed in the future." ”
Is it true that I asked? He thought for a while, was silent, and urged the bad critic to hurry to other booths...
Baidu of SenseTime is also not a "good stubble", of which Baidu's Kunlun Core also has a separate booth.
probably want to show off a wave of muscles and tell everyone that from chips to large models, Baidu has layout and self-developed technology.
Moreover, the bad critic also found that the digital employees displayed at the Bank of Communications booth, as well as Xiaoxin, the digital human assistant at the CITIC Group's booth, were all developed in cooperation with Baidu.
But what impressed me the most was that Baidu directly took out AI-related patents and pasted a wall...
It is said that this is also their corporate tradition, and in the Beijing headquarters, there is this large patent wall.
Patent wall at Baidu's headquarters
In addition, the staff of the Baidu booth also told the bad critics an interesting thing, yesterday there was a "boss" who stayed here for a long time at the booth, although the dress was no worse than the ordinary walking uncle, but the questions asked were extremely professional, making everyone nervous.
And to this day, "they still don't know the origin of the uncle they met that day".
It can only be said that the audience of this conference is indeed called a crouching tiger, hidden dragon...
Ali's side has brought you something new, that is, the latest member of Aliyun's Tongyi big model family "Tongyi Wanxiang".
Everyone is familiar with drawing, but Alibaba Cloud has gone a step further from the past diffusion model and launched a new drawing controllable diffusion model Composer.
The editorial office of Zhiwei yesterday tested a wave in detail, and interested friends can click here to take a look.
Of course, like other large model manufacturers, Alibaba Cloud is also the main promotion of a landing.
Among them, Alibaba Cloud has been emphasizing a concept called Maas (Model as a Service), in order to accelerate the implementation of large models.
To put it bluntly, Alibaba Cloud's main goal is not to build models, but to help developers or enterprises have the ability to make models.
Here in Alibaba Cloud, the bad critic also heard the most understandable metaphor about the general large model and the industry model.
That is the current general big model, which is equivalent to a junior high school student, with basic common sense and language understanding ability.
And throw a few mentally retarded bar jokes in front of the big model, throw a few brain teasers, and then spit out a sentence "AI is this?" The gameplay is of little value at the moment.
Therefore, according to Alibaba Cloud's metaphor, in order to make the big model really land, you should be on the basis of "junior high school students", choose arts and sciences, choose majors, and under the tuning of developers and the watering of industry data, you can truly become an "expert".
This is how the big model really makes sense.
The Ant Group booth near Alibaba's booth focused on AI safety and ethics
What is more impressive on Tencent's side is the application of AI in modeling and games.
For example, in the past, it would take weeks to make a CG of a city layout, but with the help of AI, it can be directly shortened to 40 minutes.
Bad critics feel that this technology is more advantageous when making CG large scenes and vistas, after all, quickly generating urban backgrounds in CG is quite a useful feature in animation projects.
Then there's the AI-driven NPC characters and a universal fighting system that can make the game's "robots" behave more like humans to enhance user retention.
By the way, bad critics also have to "complain" about the Tencent Cloud Tour Great Wall project, because it is really so popular, the team has lined up to other booths.
I hope to build a few more experience tables next time.
In addition, you may not have expected that NetEase actually went to get an excavator.
Based on the self-developed industrial AI model, NetEase Fuxi has created an unmanned excavator, which is controlled by a terminal background and monitored by people.
The excavator generates a 3D reconstruction of the surrounding environment in real time during the operation, adjusts the task in real time, and is equipped with a radar device to identify people moving nearby and avoid accidental injury.
In addition, the bad critics also saw a lot of interesting things.
For example, Tesla's humanoid robot has attracted many audiences, but unfortunately this thing can't move, it's just a model.
The iFLYTEK electronic dog I met by chance at the exhibition made me suddenly miss the hot pot in Hangzhou when I was far away in Shanghai.
The AI robotic arms that can be seen everywhere also make people feel like they are in a science fiction movie.
There are also virtual anchors who are dancing on the spot, and the bad reviews have been watching for hours.
Of course, there are still some regrets, one is to visit many virtual human company products, but I feel that the homogenization of products is quite serious.
Because some virtual people involve real-time generation, they are very simple 3D renderings and are not real, but the promotional video is done at the top...
There is also that the scale of this conference is really too big, bad critics and colleagues, about a quarter of the entire conference, there are hundreds of academic industry forums, robot competitions, and corporate open day activities, etc., these are really inadequate, unable to participate in them all.
But there are still a lot of gains, the most important of which is to see a major trend in the AI industry, that is, thousands of industries need AI to trigger change, and AI is indeed landing step by step.
Let's just say that the bad critics saw dozens of purchasing groups holding signs, and I believe that they must have come with questions and needs.
I also believe that in the end, they also found an AI solution that suits them.
At tonight's WAIC closing ceremony, the conference also announced relevant data, and the conference connected 210 upstream and downstream enterprises to reach 11 billion intentional procurement amount; 32 major industrial projects signed with a total investment of 28.8 billion yuan.
It is undeniable that AI is accelerating its integration with the industry.
But on the other hand, the more I learned about the conference, the more questions the bad critics had.
For example, at present, more than 80 large models have been released in China alone, many of which are still general large models, do we really need so many "group models dancing"?
UNESCO officials also questioned that AI technology would replicate and amplify discrimination, thereby deepening social inequalities; The impact on the environment cannot be ignored, just training a large model of GPT-3 produces carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to 125 flights to and from Beijing and New York (the large model will emit more after running); Large language models also generate a lot of errors and false information.
So how do we solve these problems?
Including Musk, he also mentioned that the number of AI robots will exceed the number of humans in the future.
So, will there be a conflict of survival and ethics between humans and AI robots?
But looking back, maybe the bad critics have thought too much, after all, the history of our human development is a history of constantly exploring the unknown, constantly discovering problems and solving problems.
So at least bad critics are still optimistic about the future of AI.
Cautious optimism, of course.