On April 11, the 2024 ZTE Cloud-Network Ecosystem Summit was held in Nanjing, and the ZTE Industry Terminal Partner Conference and Spring New Product Launch Conference were also held at the same time. During the meeting, Tang Chen had a conversation with Ni Fei, senior vice president and president of ZTE's terminal business department, and exchanged views on ZTE's understanding and playing style of industry trends after the large model set off a new wave of artificial intelligence (AI).
Ni Fei said that the reason why they are saying that 2024 is the first year of AI mobile phones is because the mobile phone industry is still in the exploration stage, and everyone is considering whether they can form a particularly good scene on the consumer side. "I believe that it will definitely be formed, ZTE has started to do some things, and it will be gradually released to everyone." According to his description, these things include the end-to-side computing power related to the base model, the changes in the interaction of the mobile phone, and the exploration of mobile phone peripheral accessories.
In the process of sharing, I was deeply impressed by the statements of "technology for good" and "AI equality". At present, artificial intelligence is reshaping the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) industry, and in addition to empowering various software and hardware products, everyone should be able to enjoy the convenience brought by AI.
AI mobile phones have entered the era of 100-yuan machines
It is worth mentioning that on April 9, before the dialogue, ZTE's cutting-edge smartphone brand Nubia held a spring new product launch conference and released three new models for the consumer market: Nubia Z60 Ultra Photographer's Edition, Nubia Flip and Nubia Maverick. These three products have different positioning, but they all have one thing in common, they all apply AI technology.
The most noteworthy is Nubia Maverick, although its starting price is as low as 799 yuan, it is not weak in the implementation of AI functions. It is equipped with the same AI functions as the flagship, supporting a number of AI functions such as AI imaging, AI intelligent voice, and AI all-round intelligent power saving.
At present, "AI reconstructs smart devices" has become an industry consensus, and smartphone products also widely use artificial intelligence technology. Since 2023, almost all manufacturers, including ZTE, Samsung, Huawei, OPPO, Xiaomi, Honor and Apple, have been making efforts in the direction of AI. Apple, in particular, is widely believed to be one of Apple's most important strategies after the news that it has abandoned car building.
Canalys, a market research agency, predicts that about 5% of the total global smartphone shipments in 2024 will be equipped with device-side AI computing capabilities. IDC predicts that global shipments of new-generation AI mobile phones will reach 170 million units in 2024, accounting for 15% of overall smartphone shipments. By 2027, the share of AI mobile phones in the Chinese market will exceed 50%.
For the smartphone industry, where hardware forms are becoming increasingly homogeneous, this is a new incremental space. Nubia believes that the popularization of AI should not stop at flagship models and mid-range models, and the 100-yuan machine market, which has a wider audience, should also enjoy inclusiveness. As Zhang Lei, general manager of Nubia's flagship products, said: "The AI model is profoundly changing the interaction mode and application ecology of smartphones, leading a new round of transformation in the smartphone industry. But we firmly believe that AI shouldn't just be the preserve of top-of-the-line flagships. ”
The biggest significance of Nubia Maverick is that this new machine has almost single-handedly opened the era of 100 yuan for AI mobile phones, becoming a new choice for entry-level AI mobile phones. The official evaluation is "100 yuan AI + 100 yuan 5G + 100 million pixels". The magnitude of this step was described by the media as "flipping the table".
In fact, behind this is the support of ZTE's "AI for All" product concept, ZTE hopes to integrate AI technology into every mobile phone, and continuously expand the application scope of AI, so that it can benefit a wider range of user groups. Nubia Mavericks shows ZTE's determination to popularize AI in the mobile phone industry, and it also enriches ZTE's "toolbox" together with other smart terminal products released at this summit.
AI for All="No one is missing"
But many people will also have the same question, at present, the most heard bet on AI in the mobile phone industry is "All in AI", which is similar to stud, which can better enable ordinary consumers to understand the determination of mobile phone brands in the direction of AI, and the market awareness is higher. And Nubia's concept of "AI for All", is there a difference in route or playing style?
Ni Fei gave a detailed answer to this question. He said that All in AI, which is mentioned from the perspective of mobile phone manufacturers, and AI for All is from the perspective of customers. From the perspective of manufacturers, all intelligent terminal products and solutions will have to be redesigned from the direction of AI in the future, which is the development trend of the industry. In other words, software and hardware such as system equipment and terminal equipment will have to be overturned and restarted because of the emergence of AI. At the same time, the company's structure and product planning need to be reorganized around AI. It's called All in AI, and there's no logical problem.
However, for ZTE, ZTE terminals are consumer goods, and it needs to focus on customer needs, that is, what kind of value AI can bring to customers is the core consideration. In this regard, Ni Fei focused on a concept called "science and technology benefiting the people" or "AI equality". Of course, this is not a new formulation. In the context of ZTE, the concept of AI for All and All is for all users, that is, it hopes to truly make AI serve all consumers and realize the benefits of science and technology through its own technical strength and product capabilities, which is also the original intention of ZTE to propose AI for All.
This also means that an intrinsic requirement of AI for All is to practice AI equality. In Tang Chen's view, if ZTE wants to achieve "AI for All, not a slogan", it needs to reassure ZTE users in two dimensions: price and product.
The first is the price. It is necessary to add an industry background here, limited by cost factors such as computing power, large model size, and AI technology deployment, at present, the functions of AI mobile phones are more applied to flagship products, which also means that AI mobile phones are generally not cheap. For example, Samsung's S24 series, which is known as the world's first AI mobile phone, wants to enjoy full-featured AI services, with a starting price of up to 8899 yuan. This threshold once made consumers think that AI mobile phones may only be exclusive to high-end business people.
For users, the easy-to-use AI phone is a real AI phone, but there is also a precondition that needs to be added: consumers must be able to afford it. Price is the most real consumption threshold, if consumers can not have the opportunity to experience the convenience and efficiency of AI, the connotation of "AI mobile phone" is still lacking. Based on this understanding, when friends were still snatching the minds of AI mobile phone users at the price of 1999 yuan, Nubia took the lead in delegating AI functions to 100 yuan machines, opening up a new way in the involuted mobile phone industry. With a new track comes new opportunities.
The second is product strategy. Ni Fei once said that AI should not only be exclusive to some top flagships, but should be good and equal. In this sense, the price can filter out a part of the users, but more product coverage is conducive to the realization of AI equality. According to Ni Fei's previous statement, in terms of AI product strategy, ZTE will start with flagship machines, first ZTE and Nubia flagship models, and then slowly devolve to mid-range products and entry-level products, so that consumers can experience ZTE's AI capabilities and services.
In terms of terminal products, in addition to Nubia Mavericks, during the summit, ZTE industry terminals also launched a number of new products, including dual-satellite dual-system 5G security flagship Axon 60 Ultra, the world's first AI 5G FWA product G5 Ultra, the first high-gain 5G-A outdoor FWA product G5F, the world's first 5G+AI glasses-free 3D tablet nubia Pad 3D II, and the self-built high-performance desktop AxonStation. In addition, ZTE is also exploring hardware forms other than mobile phones. Ni Fei emphasized that the AI defined by ZTE is a full-scenario ecosystem. In this ecosystem, mobile phones are the most core link, but they are not the only ones.
In Zhang Yimou's old movie "No One is Missing", the girl Wei Minzhi substitutes for the teacher, and she remembers Teacher Gao's advice that no one can be missing. When Zhang Huike dropped out of school to work in the city, Wei Minzhi was determined to get Zhang Huike back and went into the city alone to find someone.
From this point of view, AI for All can also be understood as "no one is missing" on the ZTE AI mobile phone roadmap, and ZTE terminals are building a comprehensive system capability of "Al for All" around price and products. While the industry is exploring how to define "AI mobile phone", ZTE has also found a way to the future that suits its own physique, but ZTE will also face the market test and cost challenges brought by 100 yuan AI mobile phones.
Mobile phones are still the most suitable AI carriers at present
An AI phone roadmap is a must-do to stay at the smartphone table. Specifically, ZTE, with its 39 years of deep cultivation in the ICT field, has the advantage of accumulating full-stack and all-domain technologies. "We do have to do something. The most important thing about these "things" is the construction of the underlying AI capabilities, which can be understood at several levels.
First of all, ZTE has its own Nebula model. Now it is a large cloud model, and in the future, it will also promote the device-side model. This is basically the same as the "device-cloud collaboration" model of mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, which can effectively balance the problem of excessive cloud computing power cost while protecting user privacy.
Secondly, ZTE also provides end-to-end computing infrastructure solutions, covering all computing power fields and high-speed WAN interconnection fields.
Third, ZTE will also cooperate with other Internet companies to provide an AI developer platform. In the future, ZTE users do not need to know how to program, they only need to call different agents to form their own applications, which is different from the original traditional development model.
Finally, ZTE's entire AI base will be open to cooperation with third-party large models. There are many well-known large model companies in the industry, and each large model has its own capabilities and advantages. Based on ZTE's open platform, it will be upgraded to some industry-level models, such as carrier-grade models, such as mine-level models.
Not only that, ZTE will also launch an end-to-end model for individual consumers. This may be a small model, and the combination of AI will bring a new mode of interaction. In the future, it may bring changes to the overall experience of ecological terminals. For example, the penetration of APP, natural language interaction, etc., may eventually give birth to a new form of hardware, which is a future trend.
Even so, Ni Fei believes that mobile phones are still the most suitable AI carrier at present. Based on the smart terminal in the form of mobile phones, AI presents the characteristics of synaesthesia: more data collection can provide better AI empowerment. On this basis, there may be more demand for AI accessories in the future to provide better synaesthesia, collect and perceive the industry, the environment, and data, and hand over the data to the computing center on the mobile phone to provide better AI services.
This is also the reason why everyone says that 2024 is the first year of AI mobile phones. Zhou Hongyi said that 2024 is the year of the scene, and the key is to find the "star scene" in combination with the business, and then design the function according to the scene, and conduct special training on the large model according to the functional requirements.
Previously, Tang Chen analyzed that under the bottleneck of innovation in the smartphone industry, mobile phone manufacturers have formed a tacit understanding: all functions/businesses can be redone with large models. However, how to build AI system capabilities, different vendors have different thinking "according to local conditions".
ZTE's terminal business focuses on realizing technology benefiting the people and AI equality, so that more users can experience AI and use AI, or it is an effective path for smartphone manufacturers to overtake in corners in the era of large models. Of course, whether these measures can be accepted by the market and whether they can satisfy consumers remains to be further verified.
Write on the back:
In fact, before talking to Ni Fei, Tang Chen was also invited to visit ZTE's Nanjing Binjiang Intelligent Manufacturing Base. The intelligent robots, 5G+AI, flexible production management, automated production lines and other links displayed at the base are impressive, and the understanding of the concept of new quality productivity is more concrete.
When walking to the automatic quality inspection link, set a very small white scene, as shown in the figure below for self-testing, and find yourself in the visible range of the naked eye. Analogy filters matches in portrait information.
The delay of information and the confirmation of objects are unbearable for the reduction of efficiency, but this part of the scanning work is handed over to the intelligent machine, which is to take tens or even tens of thousands of photos in a few seconds, instantly complete the cloud information comparison, and provide results in real time.
So, the new question is the conservative technocratic view: what about humans when machines come?
I'm Tang Chen, and I'm interested in Internet technology and business stories. Original content, without permission, please do not reprint.
"Tang Chen Dougaku"
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