Edit | Yuer Lake
Produced | Tide Rising Network "Yu See Column"
The boom of "ChatGPT" and AI large models that emerged at the end of 2022 has not receded. On the last day of August, large models are once again a hot topic. In the early morning of August 31, the technology circle began to boil in the middle of the night because of a news. The reason was that Baidu Wenxin announced in the early morning that it would be officially opened to the public at 0:00 on the same day, and quickly triggered heated discussions among practitioners on social media such as Zhihu.
Subsequently, the large model products of Douyin, Zhipu AI, Chinese Academy of Sciences, SenseTime, MiniMax, and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory also announced that they can directly provide services to the public. As one of the first AI model manufacturers to release the news, Baidu also caused agitation in the capital market, and at the close of Hong Kong stocks at noon on August 31, Baidu's share price rose 3.4% from the previous day's close.
People inside believe that Baidu launched Wen Xin on March 16, or the product is not mature to open internal testing. This comprehensive opening is tantamount to the "public test" of the whole people, which will increase the chips for Baidu Wenxin's deep learning and become more intelligent.
In this regard, general users are also particularly concerned about whether users will be charged after Wen Xin is fully opened. "Yujian Column" believes that at the current stage, Wen Xin Yiyan may be far more valuable than the current pursuit of profit and commercialization by virtue of the increase in its user base to continuously improve its product experience and market competitiveness.
According to the latest data from Baidu's official platform, on the first day of the opening of the "Wenxin Yiyan" service (0:00 to 24:00 on August 31), a total of more than 33.42 million questions were answered by netizens, with an average of 23,000 questions answered in one minute. Such a huge amount of data is enough to confirm the huge market demand for AI large models. Therefore, the market is also full of expectations for the full opening of Wen Xin's words, and investors are full of confidence in it.
Long-term layout, natural fit
As we all know, Baidu is one of the earliest technology companies in China to enter the artificial intelligence industry, and after the boom of AI big models, Baidu has accelerated the layout of related products, so it has also been able to make Wenxin the first domestic AI model for society.
Under the boom of AI large models, Baidu's speed of launching Wenxin Yiyan has also caused the industry to question whether Wenxin Yiyan is a "rushed" rush project? In fact, this may not be the case, Baidu even came prepared. Industry insiders believe that Baidu's release of the closed beta version on March 16 is only seizing the most suitable time for the release of AI large model products.
It is understood that Wen Xin Yiyan is based on the basic model library in Baidu Feijiao's open source deep learning platform - Wenxin Big Model, and the core technology is ERNIE series models. The underlying logic is that it provides services through Baidu Intelligent Cloud to attract enterprises and institutional customers to use the APIs and infrastructure provided by Baidu Intelligent Cloud to jointly build AI models and develop applications to achieve industrial AI inclusion. This also means that compared with other AI large model manufacturers, Baidu Wenxin has more "use".
It is worth mentioning that the Wenxin large model is relatively complete and comprehensive in terms of core technology and its application scenarios. It includes NLP large model, CV large model, cross-modal large model, biological computing large model, industry large model, etc.
The corresponding product functions are also rich and diverse. Taking the NLP large model as an example, it has NLP scenarios such as language understanding and language generation, and has the capabilities of language understanding, dialogue generation, and literary creation.
It is observed that the most widely used AIGC technology at present, Baidu Wenxin's experience is not weaker than people. At the same time, its CV large model, cross-modal large model, biocomputing large model, and industry large model can also match a wider range of application scenarios, so that the value of its AI technology as an industry infrastructure can be fully released.
For example, its biocomputing big model integrates the characteristics of research objects in the biological field to build a pre-training model in the field of biocomputing for compound molecules and protein molecules.
As a result, Baidu artificial intelligence also has a full-stack layout in the four layers of chip, framework, model and application, and Wenxin's words have also become a model project from AI technology to AI application in mainland China, and have become a classic representative of AI large model products. After Baidu has been deeply engaged in AI for a long time and gradually applied its technology to industries and industries, its forward-looking long-term layout has also come to fruition with the help of Baidu Wenxin.
Scenarios and applications are king, and Wen Xin builds a deeper moat
Before the widespread application of AI large models, there were some voices about the prospects of AI artificial intelligence. The reason is that the AI industry not only has a high technical threshold, but also has a difficult application.
At the same time, application-related scenarios are difficult to find, which is also a dilemma faced by this industry. On the one hand, the relatively popular scenarios are face recognition, speech recognition, text recognition, etc., but in these applications, they face the problem of product homogeneity and fierce competition, which makes it difficult to stand out.
On the other hand, relatively long-tail AI application scenarios will face the problem of high R&D costs and disproportionate input-output. Obviously, this is a very contradictory key factor that hinders AI companies from applying their technology on a large scale.
Fortunately, Baidu has always been a "long-termist" strategy in artificial intelligence, so it has been able to take into account the parallel of technology research and development and scenario application, and with the help of AI large models, its technology has been implemented and taken a step further.
Take Baidu's autonomous driving and smart city transportation as an example. Before AI models were widely used, surveillance video of congested roads required heavy reliance on manual data query, which was labor-intensive and inefficient, and prone to errors. However, with the help of artificial intelligence, some tasks such as catching violations and catching fugitives that are difficult to complete manually can be easily and efficiently completed.
In the generative AI application sector, Baidu Wenxin's words reflect its intelligent side. According to the feedback of users who participated in the previous test, Baidu Wenxin Yiyan is different from the previous search engine, when users "ask" Wenxin, there will be no more results, but output an accurate answer that is closest to the user's question appeal. In early June, netizens used Wen Xin's big model to write college entrance examination essays, and the topic of college entrance examination essays was even more brushed for a while.
It is worth mentioning that as the AI large model technology becomes more and more mature, the experience of major model products is becoming more and more perfect, and a new trend has emerged, that is, the application of large models combines medical, education, office IT software, cultural tourism and other industries, gradually finds application scenarios, and releases its application value. For example, Ctrip has previously released the first large model of the travel vertical industry.
It is understood that at present, Baidu Wenxin's words have not only been applied to all aspects of people's lives, but also brought new changes in industries such as intelligent manufacturing and smart factory transformation in the industrial field. Whether it is automated production lines or the optimization of machine autonomous decision-making, AI big models have become another new force to promote the industrial revolution in the new era.
Wen Xin's words + "cloud intelligence integration" to release ecological value
In recent years, the phenomenon of mainland science and technology being "stuck in the neck" of foreign countries has occurred from time to time, so the state is also constantly encouraging scientific and technological research and development, as well as the application of related technologies. Previously, the People's Daily commented even more: said that the competition of AI large models will be the competition of national science strategy in the future.
It can be seen that Baidu Wenxin's words are not a simple AI product for Baidu, but also an important starting point for its artificial intelligence business ecology to form a closed loop, and even have more long-term strategic significance.
In fact, in the past few years, Baidu has been adopting "cloud-intelligence integration" as its development strategy. In other words, Baidu's enterprise-oriented cloud services, as well as its long-term deep cultivation of artificial intelligence, are gradually moving towards integration and forming ecological effects.
In terms of forming ecological effects, Baidu's advantage is that in the past few years, Baidu has accumulated a large number of enterprise-level resources through search engines, artificial intelligence, and cloud services. Therefore, its large-model products are also gradually penetrating into various services on the enterprise side, and thus bring greater imagination.
Similar to Baidu, Alibaba, following Baidu Wenxin's internal beta on March 16, Alibaba's Alibaba Cloud, also released Tongyi Qianwen on April 11, also with the help of Alibaba's B-end user resources and Alibaba Cloud operation system, cloud services, intelligence, large models, etc. are gradually integrated.
It can be seen that when large model products are popular, the industry structure of cloud computing is also undergoing unprecedented changes, and even is completely changing the industry rules of cloud computing. At the same time, the consensus in the industry is that cloud-intelligence integration is accelerating, and the era of model-as-a-service (MaaS) has arrived, and will even become the mainstream business model in the future.
In fact, the term "cloud-intelligence integration" first appeared in the strategy released by Baidu Intelligent Cloud in 2020. At that time, Baidu's strategy was to use AI intelligence as infrastructure and general AI products for domestic enterprises, and bring greater application value to society through open thinking. Now it seems that with the blessing of AI large models, this possibility will also have a broader imagination.
What is valuable is that before the launch of Wenxin's big model product, Baidu Intelligent Cloud upgraded the cloud-intelligence integration strategy twice in 2021 and 2022, and launched the Baidu AI Foundation, a product that accelerated the construction of cloud-intelligence integration in December 2022.
It can be seen that the AI model has gradually become the standard configuration of enterprise digitalization and intelligent evolution from insufficient market cognition, but it is a new trend that gradually emerges after long-term cultivation of technology companies represented by Baidu, so it also allows many enterprises to see more possibilities for their own participation in the digital transformation and upgrading of traditional enterprises, and the use of "AI to reengineer business" has also become a common choice for enterprises.
It is foreseeable that for Baidu, because Wenxin Yiyan fills the blank space of its previous AI technology opening and application, it will also accelerate the commercialization and scale of the artificial intelligence that Wen Xin has laid out for many years, and release its ecological value.
epilogue
Compared with the companies behind the large-model products on the market, Baidu's technical strength is undoubted. Baidu is even the only company in the world with leading self-developed products in the four layers, which can achieve end-to-end optimization in these four layers of architecture and greatly improve efficiency.
The expectation of industry insiders is that while Baidu Intelligent Cloud becomes the first cloud in China to train a large language model, Wenxin's words are also expected to become another masterpiece to further strengthen the integration of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and even become an important link between AI from technology to application, from gradual opening to ecology.
Wen Xin's opening to the whole society this time will also make the mainland artificial intelligence industry a big step forward, and even become a milestone event for AI models to move towards "sunshine" and benefit the people's livelihood.