Pioneers win opportunities, and AI is "exploding" in 5 industries

文 | 四分仪Quadrant，作者 | 靳淇，编辑 | 孙迩溪

In addition to the well-known news, film and television, creative and other media content industries that directly apply AIGC, the disruptive effect of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is accelerating around the world, and the Internet, finance, education, healthcare, manufacturing ——— These major industries are taking the lead in ushering in a new round of changes, which is not only a challenge to the past model, but also opens up opportunities for future growth, promoting "industry as a scenario, industry as a service".

Those industry pioneers who dare to embrace change are taking the lead in enjoying the dividends of the times in this round of Gen AI wave, seeking change in tradition and riding the momentum in change.

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is continuing to heat up at a terrifying rate, and it is in full swing in every corner of the industry.

On March 13, Figure, a star robotics startup in Silicon Valley, released its first robot demo supported by OpenAI's large model. Figure 01 illustrates the dialogue with a human in the framework of an end-to-end neural network, without any remote operation, which can describe its visual experience, plan future actions, reflect on one's own memory, and explain the reasoning process verbally at a speed close to that of a human.

Back last year, everything changed completely after the advent of ChatGPT. According to a recent study by the University of Montana in the United States, ChatGPT is already comparable to the top 1% of human thinkers in terms of creative thinking tests, and will elevate human cognitive intelligence to unprecedented heights, subverting the global economy, social life and thousands of industries, far exceeding the mechanization of labor during the Industrial Revolution.

The evolutionary wave of the Gen AI era is turbulent enough, and it is predicted in the industry that in less than 10 years, robots will develop into a level that most people cannot imagine now, entering all aspects of social life and human production. In the explosive iteration of generative AI, the public has begun to feel the disruptive impact of breakthrough AI innovations on all aspects of people's lives, and with it, a lot of anticipation and panic about the future.

Morgan Stanley released the TMT conference report "15 Ways to Play AI" on March 12, which excerpted 480 stocks since the release of ChatGPT, in-depth analysis of multiple market segments in the AI field, and selected the three themes with the best performance and expected return since the beginning of this year: Smartphones & Edge AI, and Powering GenAI & Data Centres), The Adopter Opportunity.

"Pioneers win opportunities" is the focus of this article. In the promotion of generative AI technology, many people have the panic of "unemployment", but in practical application, the quadrant has seen that in addition to the well-known text, video and other industries, the Internet, finance, education, medical care, manufacturing and other industries are also experiencing a new round of technological change, AI technology continues to promote the transformation of these industries, but also to the pioneers who dare to try and change to bring new opportunities, those who actively embrace change, are enjoying this round of technological change in the wave of AI dividends. The application of AI at the forefront of these industries is becoming more and more obvious to everyone's life, and it is also changing the way people work and live habits.

Consumer electronics: Software, hardware, and talent are being "revolutionized" by AI

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is holding the super heat of the large model market, attracting the attention of countless consumer electronics manufacturers. Whether it is PC (personal computer), mobile phone and other hardware manufacturers, or game, entertainment, social networking and other software industry veterans, they are trying to get a piece of the pie from this blue ocean. After Lenovo and Honor, Microsoft's first AI PC is also coming: Microsoft announced the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop that will be released on March 21, both of which are built around artificial intelligence.

Similarly, the smartphone industry has also quickly entered the lively "New Warring States Era", competing to lay out the AI field and promote the implementation of generative AI from the cloud to mobile devices.

The Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily recently reported that OPPO announced the establishment of an AI center, Meizu stopped developing traditional smartphones, and the two are fully committed to integrating AI technology into mobile phone operating systems, and Chinese mobile phone manufacturers including Honor, Vivo, and Xiaomi have successively launched AI models for mobile applications.

Yang Ruilin, research director of the International Institute of Obstetrics at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, predicts that application software developers around the world will focus on generative AI applications, and the next six months will be full of flowers, including the iPhone and China's mobile phone manufacturers, which are also expected to launch flagship AI phones in the second half of the year.

Aijiwei, an Internet platform for China's information and communication industry, pointed out that the rise of AI mobile phones will bring three major trends, including a personalized operating system equipped with a new human-computer interaction, the "de-app" of devices, and the gradual withdrawal of smartphones.

What's even more worrying is that the new wave of intelligent transformation of generative AI on the industrial side has just begun, and the impact on the human side has already taken the lead.

On March 12, the first AI software engineer debuted, which directly detonated the entire technology circle. With a single command, it handles the entire development project end-to-end. In the SWE-bench benchmark, it solves 13.86% of problems without human assistance.

This is the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer who can plan and execute complex software engineering tasks that require thousands of decisions to complete. In the future, humanity will only need to call the shots and do nothing else.

Finance: From B to C, AI is impacting every investor

Many believe that generative AI may be the first to "take out" the financial industry. Finance is the job of processing massive amounts of data and analyzing large amounts of information, and the automation potential offered by generative AI is of great significance to the financial industry and could greatly influence financial decision-making.

In the financial sector, generative AI is considered to have broad prospects in markets, transactions, and regulation. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released a report on January 23 saying that AI will play an important role in four aspects: central bank information collection, macroeconomic analysis, payment system monitoring, and financial supervision.

Among the latest applications, AI is becoming a tool for money managers, CFOs, regulators, traders, investors, and entrepreneurs to collect, analyze, and process structured and unstructured data in their daily work.

At present, the financial models launched by various institutions around the world are greatly improving the business level and work efficiency of financial practitioners. At present, the financial industry at home and abroad is actively embracing the big model. According to a survey by IDC (International Data Corporation), more than half of financial institutions plan to invest in generative AI technology in 2023, and only 10% of financial institutions say they have no plans to pilot it.

Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, Ant Group, Du Xiaoman, Tencent Cloud, Hang Seng Electronics, etc., have successively launched financial models to provide practitioners in different financial scenarios in an all-round way, and provide in-depth intelligent services in investment research analysis, information extraction, business opportunity insight, and use of financial instruments.

With the advancement of the application of generative AI technology in the financial industry, its impact is gradually moving from TO B to TO C, and has become one of the tools for investors' investment decisions.

AI stock trading is an application that many investors are interested in. MarketSenseAI, a stock-picking AI built on the basis of GPT-4, combines the methods of chain of thought and contextual learning to analyze various data sources, including market price dynamics, financial news, company fundamentals and macroeconomic reports, etc., to simulate the decision-making process of financial investment teams. The results showed that GPT-4 outperformed the benchmark index by 13% and returned up to 40%, while maintaining a risk profile comparable to that of the market.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing in importance in the financial services sector, and a number of AI-related jobs are being created in the context of the rapid rise of technology.

According to foreign media reports, Morgan Stanley (MS. US) promoted Jeff McMillan, a technology executive in its wealth management division, to the bank's first head of artificial intelligence (AI). In June last year, JPMorgan Chase (JPM. US) has appointed Teresa Heitsenrether as Chief Data and Analytics Officer responsible for the application of artificial intelligence. Goldman Sachs (GS. US) CIO Marco Argenti is seen as a leading advocate of artificial intelligence.

For the future of the financial industry, on January 24, the "2024 Financial Industry Generative Artificial Intelligence Application Report" jointly prepared by the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University, Du Xiaoman, MIT Technology Review China, and the Center for Dynamic Competition and Innovation Strategy of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University It is expected that the first batch of large-scale model-enhanced financial institutions will enter the mature application period within 1-2 years, and the large-scale application of generative AI in the financial industry will be driven after 3 years.

Education: The fastest improving industry for AI

The education industry is one of the industries with the fastest popularization and application of AI, and it is also the industry that we can see the most changes at present.

Recently, India's first artificial intelligence (AI) teacher "Alice" has "officially taken up her post" in a school in Kerala, causing concern. According to a report by the Indian Daily Telegraph on March 10, "Alice" is a humanoid robot based on generative AI technology, developed by India's Makerlabs education technology company, aiming to create a personalized teaching experience through the power of AI and "break the boundaries of education".

Unlike traditional robots, Alice does not replace teachers, but rather acts as an aid, providing an interactive learning experience that caters to different learning styles. It is understood that "Alice" is mainly responsible for teaching kindergarten to middle school courses. The robot speaks English, Hindi and Malayalam, and the engineers who developed Alice plan to expand its language library to more than 20 languages in the future.

The Hindustan Times reported that "Alice", who can move, interact and answer questions, is loved by local students, but whenever "Alice" is in class, no student will skip class.

And before the advent of "Alice", the most talked-about application of AI in the education industry was chatbots.

Sal Khan, CEO of Khan Academy, an edtech nonprofit, delivered a TED talk in 2023 predicting that AI chatbots will soon revolutionize education, "We are on the cusp of using AI to achieve the biggest change in the history of education," and Khan declared, "We want to provide an amazing personal AI mentor for every student on the planet." ”

But in reality, the application of AI in the education industry is much faster than predicted. With the advent of "Alice," science fiction is expected to become a reality, and generative AI will deliver personalized instruction faster and more efficiently than human teachers.

Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, said, "Imagine being able to have a round-the-clock, free teacher for every student, which still smacks of science fiction, but now it's getting more realistic." ”

Qubit launched the theme report "AIGC Teaching Assistants and Tutors Come True, Learning Machines Usher in New Opportunities", pointing out that the embodied intelligence of "software and hardware" will further expand the scope of the agent's capabilities, and at this stage, the AI agent will empower the educational practice scene in the form of a robot and have stronger companionship attributes. In the brain-computer era, the interaction between AI agents and humans will be more in-depth, and AI agents' understanding of human intentions and state analysis will be more accurate, and they will be able to intervene in people with learning disabilities, and human-computer integration will reach a new height.

With the advent of "Alice", people saw that all this was coming sooner than expected.

Healthcare: R&D and innovation will be AI-driven

The application of generative AI in the medical industry is more valuable in R&D.

A recent study published in Nature Biotechnology for the first time describes the development process of the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) drug INS018_055, covering the entire process from AI algorithm development to phase 2 clinical trials. Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage generative AI-driven biotechnology company, is powering the biopharmaceutical industry with its drug discovery pipeline Pharma.AI its validated, commercializable, in-house AI drug discovery platform that spans biological, chemical, and clinical medicine as advanced generative AI tools.

In fact, "AI + healthcare" has been a track that has been laid out by various large technology companies for a long time. In July last year, Nature published a paper on Google's medical model, which explained in detail the evolution of the medical model Med-PaLM, and the researchers said that when answering medical questions, the fine-tuned medical model Med-PaLM performed well, with a group of clinicians rating its answers at 92.6%, which is comparable to the level of real-world clinicians (92.9%).

Today, NVIDIA has also accelerated its deployment in the field of "AI + healthcare", promoting the development and training of AI-based models in the fields of biology and chemistry, which are used to train and deploy large-scale biomolecular language models at a supercomputing scale to help scientists better understand diseases and find treatments for patients.

In the latest research and applications, AI is taking on more difficult "R&D tasks". Scientists are using AI to study the "dark genome" to drive new treatments and diagnostics to help cancer treatment, British biotech startup Baseimmune uses artificial intelligence to predict pathogen mutations to develop effective vaccines against the coronavirus, malaria and African swine fever, and Zephyr, a healthcare technology company invested by Eli Lilly AI, which is committed to developing data syndication tools and various machine learning algorithms in the field of oncology and cardiometabolic diseases in an attempt to reshape drug discovery and precision medicine...... 

Research shows that generative AI will have a huge impact across the value chain in healthcare and life sciences, including pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, and medical practices, and McKinsey delved into 63 generative AI data and models in life sciences to determine its impact in five key areas: research and early discovery, clinical development, operations, and commercial and medical affairs. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimates that generative AI could bring between $60 billion and $110 billion in economic value to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries annually.

Manufacturing: The face of smart manufacturing will be completely transformed

Among the major industries and fields of AI "explosion", the manufacturing industry is not so cool. But in fact, generative AI has the deepest and widest effect and coverage of the transformation of the manufacturing industry.

Generative AI can drive the efficient processing and manufacturing of products, including product design, engineering, production processes, logistics, and supply chain management, and its training data can cover sensors, time-series data from production equipment, programmable logic controller instructions, and product design and engineering processes. The underlying operations in the fields of 3D printing, new material development, automotive product manufacturing, logistics and transportation are all undergoing this wave of AI productivity transformation.

AI is accelerating the intelligence of automated workflows, accelerating and scaling the agenda for digital transformation within the enterprise with real-time insights and decisions, helping engineers identify problems and estimate the resources needed to resolve them. Physics-based AI enables engineers to formulate solution designs from the solution knowledge base.

At present, in the manufacturing industry, the latest wave of AI applications is "digital twins". A complete digital twin solution requires specialized software and technology that covers the following six functions, including: data collection and services, data integration, data intelligence, user experience and data visualization, data management, and data reliability, which can drive accurate factory planning, safety improvement, agility, and flexible factory design. Nvidia in the United States and Blackshark.ai in Austria are currently actively involved in the application of digital twins in the manufacturing sector.

The world's leading manufacturers are incorporating the latest wave of generative AI technology into every aspect of production to deliver higher-quality products and improve profit margins. In a brick-and-mortar factory, AI can power automation, robotic systems, quality inspection and testing, and predictive maintenance, dramatically reducing waste in production and supporting information availability and collaboration to dramatically improve operational productivity, equipment maintenance, and problem solving.

According to insights from a recent AI and automation survey conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value among more than 2,000 C-suite executives worldwide, companies at the forefront of generative AI adoption and data-led innovation are already reaping significant returns, with annual net profits 72% higher than other organizations and 17% higher annual revenue growth. According to a report released by IDC, China's ICT market will account for more than half of the entire ICT investment, or US$2 trillion, in the next five years. A significant part of this share will come from the manufacturing industry's demand for digital and intelligent transformation.

The infinite imagination and subversive effect of the era of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is accelerating around the world, and several major industries such as the Internet, finance, education, medical care, and manufacturing are taking the lead in ushering in a new round of changes, which is not only a challenge to the past model, but also opens up opportunities for future growth. Those who control the momentum win, and those who seek change will be successful. Under the hustle and bustle of the "100 model wars" of various AI unicorns, the application innovation and thinking transformation of thousands of industries have become a more important topic for the whole society.

Resources:

21st Century Business Herald "Large Model Reshaping Financial Format Report: A Complete Combing of the Development Status of Financial Large Models" Qubit "GPT-4 Beats Wall Street?Latest Research: Stock Selection Returns Over 40%" Qubit "AIGC Education Industry Panorama Report: AI Teaching Assistants and Tutors Come True, Learning Machines Usher in New Opportunities" 21st Century Business Herald "Domestic and Foreign Technology Giants Increase the Subversive Impact of "AI+ Medical" on Pharmaceuticals and Clinical Applications?" Qubits "The First AI Software Engineer Shakes Silicon Valley!" With 10 IOI gold medals in hand, they are determined to smash programmers' jobs" "McKinsey: Generative AI will bring $110 billion worth to healthcare" Internet of Things Think Tank "Compound growth rate of 36%, how can AI+ machine vision help accelerate intelligent manufacturing?"