Chinese online Tong Zhilei: AI empowers human beings to enter the era of "three-dimensional" development

534 days, 7 world-class products, 400 billion open-source model parameters, the "world model" was launched.

This is the speed at which AI is disrupting the world.

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, AI is entering everyone's mobile phone interface at an unimaginable speed, participating in every content creation, innovating every workflow, and transforming every assembly line.

The speed of this transformation is exponential. Recalling the Wensheng video sora released by OpenAI in February this year, many industry insiders exclaimed: I expected it to come, but I didn't expect it to come so quickly.

Disruptive technological breakthroughs, the launch of nationwide products, and explosive ecological prosperity...... All signs indicate that AI, as the third wave of technological explosion in human history since the Industrial Revolution, has come to us. They have a common keyword: productivity.

As one of the birthplaces of AI applications, the content industry is taking the lead in ushering in the "AI moment". Recently, Chinese Online released its 2023 fiscal year annual report, and Tong Zhilei, chairman and president of Chinese Online Group, released a letter to investors, telling Chinese Online's answer: make AI more suitable for the content industry and China's content industry.

In order to achieve this, Tong Zhilei clarified three directions that Chinese Online will continue to cultivate in the future: AI vertical large models, market application of AI content, and flexible supply chain of AI content.

Actively choose the "cold bench", AI is just a road, not a destination

Tong Zhilei believes that the current content industry is in urgent need of massive personalized and multimodal content, and AI has improved content creation from "human mode" to "computing power mode", which he calls "the AI moment of the content industry". Using AI, Chinese Online has the potential to develop its own "Ford assembly line" for the content industry.

The key is to make AI concrete and usable to meet the needs of real-world creation. In the past year, Chinese Online's most important action in the field of AI was the release of the AI-assisted creation model "Chinese Xiaoyao". This is the world's first 10,000-word creation model, and it is also the first large-scale model to break through the million-word long text. However, compared with technical indicators, Tong Zhilei pays more attention to the ability of "Chinese Xiaoyao" to deal with actual content creation problems: world view structure, story conception, plot arrangement, content writing, and even character possession, character dialogue, illustration production, and even content quality judgment.

"For the global revolution brought about by AI, the application of writing novels and storytelling may only be regarded as a "cold bench", but for the content industry, this is our future. Tong Zhilei's calm thinking under the boom of AI large model technology stems from his basic judgment on the development of the content industry: AI is only a road, not a destination, and there is only one destination for Chinese online: apply AI and do a good job of content.

In the end, Tong Zhilei hopes to let more ordinary people have content creation capabilities with the blessing of AI, and more excellent authors can create more great works—this is the "big model view" of Chinese Online.

According to the financial report data, by the end of 2023, there will be more than 4.5 million original resident authors on the Chinese online network, and the new writing experience brought by the Chinese Xiaoyao model will greatly release the productivity of existing authors. At the same time, it will continue to attract writing enthusiasts to join in and enrich the diversity of the platform's own online literary content.

The supply of massive and diversified content is an indispensable soil for the emergence of high-quality IP. Through the AI model, the scale and richness of content will be increased exponentially, and a "Ford assembly line" serving the content industry will be created. Chinese Online, the content aircraft carrier, is sailing on an increasingly wide ocean.

The most effective way to make AI money: Participate in market-oriented projects that make money

Just like in the Internet era, when the spotlight shifted from computers and operating systems to various "killer apps", when AI really came into reality, technology would be hidden behind the scenes as infrastructure, and applications would take center stage. Applications are closer to each of us, and therefore closer to commercialization.

Tong Zhilei believes that the most effective way to make AI money is to let AI participate in market-oriented projects that make money. Judging from the actual situation of the current AI content application of Chinese Online, it has covered many content fields such as novels, comics, dynamic comics, audio, and short dramas.

For example, at present, Chinese Online's "AI anchors" have recorded more than 180,000 hours of audio books, saving more than 90% of time costs; AI comics "I Dominate Reiki Recovery" and "My Apprentice is Actually a Female Emperor" have been launched on Tencent Animation, Kuaikan Comics, Beep Station Comics and other platforms; AI has translated more than 25 million words of novel IP content and successfully launched overseas.

One of the most noteworthy AI applications is the skit. According to the data, by November 2023, the number of micro-short dramas recorded in China will exceed 4,000, and the average daily turnover of short dramas will reach 80 million. Tong Zhilei believes that short dramas have many underlying logic in common with online texts, such as the pursuit of coolness, which makes a large number of online texts naturally have the advantage of short drama IP adaptation. Based on this judgment, Chinese Online launched this 1-2min/episode video series 3 years ago, and took the lead in calling it a micro-short drama. Skits even surpassed AI for a time and became a bigger label for Chinese online.

In the future, with the blessing of AI, how will short dramas move from "making money" to "big business"? The key word is still productivity. The shooting and creation cycle of short dramas is extremely short, and the efficiency requirements for script adaptation and post-production are extremely high. In other words, from production to consumption, a short drama naturally needs AI as a content productivity tool to "reduce costs and increase efficiency".

According to iiMedia Consulting, the size of China's online short drama market was 37.39 billion yuan last year, a year-on-year increase of nearly 267.65%, and the market size is expected to reach 100 billion yuan in 2027. As a pioneer in the short drama track, Chinese Online "AI+ Short Drama" has endless commercial value-added space.

AI + Culture Going Global 2.0: Create a flexible supply chain for content

Behind the overseas explosion of micro-short dramas is not only the eye-catching content to capture overseas audiences, but also the ability upgrade of the whole chain of AI empowerment from content production, derivative development to distribution and consumption. This actually opens up a broader space for Chinese content to sail into the sea in the next 20 years: AI helps Chinese culture go overseas into version 2.0. The core of this is to build a "flexible supply chain" for the content industry with the help of AI.

Tong Zhilei used the cross-border e-commerce giant SHEIN, which is valued at $60 billion, as an analogy. SHEIN's success is inseparable from its flexible supply chain model that has built and continues to evolve - according to market demand, small batches of rapid testing, and then according to the test results, choose whether to increase production, avoid inventory backlog, with higher efficiency, lower cost, to meet more personalized and more changeable fashion consumer needs, the final product on the new cycle is only 1/2 of the fast fashion giant ZARA.

If content products are compared to clothes, then Chinese Online can use AI to create a "flexible content supply chain" like SHEIN - based on the massive online content, data resources and algorithm capabilities accumulated in the past, to achieve customized overseas content products with Chinese cultural core according to the preferences of overseas users, and to improve the efficiency of content production and distribution.

Tong Zhilei then gave an example: from letting all overseas readers read a copy of "Dream of Red Mansions" to using massive content to meet the needs of users with different tastes. This is the 2.0 version of Chinese content going overseas in his eyes, a new thinking of Chinese content going overseas.

In this regard, Chinese Online is already taking action. For example, in the Japanese market, the birthplace of animation culture, it focuses on the release of animation works adapted from its own online literary IP, so that short drama content rich in Chinese cultural characteristics and European and American elements sweeps the North American market, and in the Southeast Asian market, AI adaptations of Chinese history-related themes are released.

In the future, as AI technology and content products accelerate and mature, Chinese Online may have the opportunity to build a global AI content library and customize personalized content products for global audiences, so that "AI is not only a tool to improve productivity, but also an incredible tool to meet everyone's own needs." ”

End

In 2024, we are on the eve of this wave of AI applications.

Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu were born at the top of the last wave of the Internet, and this round of mobile Internet wave has incubated giants such as ByteDance, Meituan, and Pinduoduo.

Nowadays, AI has set off the fourth industrial revolution, and we have seen the emergence of giants or unicorns such as OpenAI, Google, and X.ai in the AI large model track, and perhaps soon, AI will give birth to another new track: AI applications. In this sense, Chinese Online has the opportunity to become the "number one player" of AI applications in the world.