In 2018, artificial intelligence rose to become a national strategy. This year, Shanghai organized the first World Artificial Intelligence Conference, and Beijing established the Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.
Text: You Yong
Edited by Zhou Luping
01
In 2009, the first IT Leaders Summit opened in Shenzhen, its predecessor was called the Digital China Summit Closed-door Forum, which was held in Beijing and San Francisco alternately. After moving to Shenzhen in 2009, it was renamed the IT Leaders Summit, and the purpose at that time was also very pure, just to discuss the future development direction of the IT industry.
At that time, the aftermath of the financial tsunami was still raging, and the global IT industry was facing serious challenges. Therefore, the theme of the first year is called "China's High-tech Industry after the Financial Tsunami".
The venue of the conference was selected at the Wuzhou Hotel, and the venues of the later sessions were basically fixed here. There are many stories that have been born here. In 2000, Huawei held a ceremony for 2,000 R&D soldiers to encourage employees to go overseas and expand their territory. Since then, Huawei has transformed from a national enterprise into a global enterprise.
There is a reason why Shenzhen was chosen for the IT Leaders Summit, in addition to Shenzhen's own industrial and geographical advantages, it also has a lot to do with Mayor Xu at that time. Before coming to Shenzhen, Mayor Xu was the director of the high-tech industry department of the National Development and Reform Commission, and he was naturally close to the IT industry.
Moreover, at that time, Shenzhen was facing the pressure of industrial transformation and upgrading, and the introduction of the grand event of the technology industry undoubtedly played a very positive role in Shenzhen's IT atmosphere, including Baidu's South China headquarters and international headquarters and Alibaba's international operation headquarters in Shenzhen Bay's ABP, all of which were facilitated by the IT Leaders Summit.
It was Shenzhen that set up the stage, and it was Wu Ying who organized the game. Wu Ying was easily recognizable in the crowd, and his beard was very eye-catching. He was also the first batch of candidates after the resumption of the college entrance examination, majoring in radio communication at Beijing University of Technology, and later went to the United States for further study and entered the famous Bell Laboratory to work.
Around 2000, Wu Ying was a prominent figure in the domestic IT communication circle, he relied on PHS to become famous, founded UTStarcom, made a lot of money, and was known as the father of PHS in China. It is rumored that Son invested in Wu Ying's UTStarcom, and Wu Ying later introduced Son to Jack Ma, which facilitated SoftBank's investment in Alibaba. From this point of view, Wu Ying can also be regarded as Ma Yun's Bole.
Wu Ying, who was still very appealing at that time, pulled a list of dozens of people for the IT Leaders Summit, including almost all the top IT companies, financial capital, venture capital institutions and media in China at that time, including Ma Huateng, Robin Li, Cao Guowei, Xiong Xiaoge, etc., and all the famous figures in the rivers and lakes were invited.
After the first IT Summit, more than 20 IT industry leaders also issued a "Shenzhen Declaration", such as "striving to be the vanguard of economic recovery" and "strengthening independent innovation". This declaration still seems to be partially relevant.
This is considered by the outside world to be the highest-level industry conference held in Shenzhen since the establishment of the city. In Robin Li's words, "The IT Leaders Summit has recorded many cutting-edge thinking in the IT industry and witnessed the rapid development of China's IT industry. ”
02
The Big Three of the Internet Age – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT) – have always been the protagonists of the IT Leaders Summit, and every year the media is focusing on who went and who didn't, and who said what. The lively scene is very similar to the Wuzhen Summit that year, which is not as serious as the political and economic macro forum, but the guests who came are all industry leaders.
Ma Yun, Ma Huateng and Robin Li attended the meeting at the same time in 2010, Ma Yun was the first to participate, the first to appear, speaking alone, Robin Li and Ma Huateng were arranged to the high-end forum later. The topic of the exchange was cloud computing, and although the cloud has now become a recognized infrastructure, there was still a lot of controversy back then.
Robin Li may regret a point he said at the time, saying that "cloud computing is old wine in a new bottle", which has to be turned out every few years, especially after Baidu established Baidu Intelligent Cloud in 2015. Fortunately, in recent years, Feng Shui has taken turns, and Baidu, as one of the earliest major manufacturers in China to deploy artificial intelligence, Robin Li has become a guest of honor at major conferences.
The three of them were really on the same stage in 2011, and the relationship between them was quite harmonious. Ma Huateng even ridiculed himself, "He is not as good as Ma Yun in terms of eloquence, and he is not as handsome as Robin Li."
Although there are also verbal swords, the outside world sees more of the vigor of the Internet economy, they dare to express their opinions, and they are not afraid of offending their peers.
There is a picture that has been widely circulated on the Internet at this stage, the bearded Wu Ying is standing behind Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, with his hands on the shoulders of the two, the expressions of the two are quite complicated, like a sulking couple, and Li Yanhong, who is sitting next to him, has his head sideways, like a colleague eating melons in the office. This picture is at the IT Leaders Summit dinner.
Ma Huateng and Robin Li appeared the most often, and almost every session had their faces. Especially Ma Huateng, because it is the home of Shenzhen every year, it is close at hand, and it is not suitable not to go. But only 2014 was an exception, for no other reason than pure back pain. Ma Huateng not only missed the IT Leaders Summit that year, but even missed the two sessions because of back pain.
In the face of lumbar spondylosis, everyone is equal regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
Ma Huateng loves to come, and it is not purely close to home or familiar with Wu Ying. In his own words, attending the IT Summit every year is very interesting because he never communicates and memorizes lines. Although there is no Ma Yun's eloquence and Li Robin's handsomeness, Ma Huateng's main focus is sincerity.
Moreover, Wu Ying is very good at doing things, he not only has a close personal relationship with these entrepreneurs, but the key is to dare to ask any question, and he hopes to make a big news more than the on-site media.
For example, he asked Ma Huateng, if Ali were yours one day, would you do better than Jack Ma? Ma Huateng's brain was blank when asked, and he talked about him left and right the whole time.
He also asked Yang Yuanqing and Jia Yueting if they joined forces to challenge Ma Huateng and Robin Li? Jia Yueting, who seized the opportunity, was as confident as ever, and he even fired at BAT at the same time, criticizing the three mountains of BAT for making China's Internet innovation dark, "China's Internet innovation has three fates, being copied by BAT, being acquired by BAT, or taking refuge with BAT's shares." Where is China's Internet innovation heading in the future? Although Jia Yueting later failed, his words were not too problematic in the context of that year.
In 2017, it was the last time that the head of BAT shared the stage at the summit, when Ma Yun was arranged to speak alone, and did not appear on the same theme forum as Ma Huateng and Robin Li.
But Wu Yingyan was quick, pulled Ma Yun, who was about to go off the stage, and took a group photo with Robin Li and Ma Huateng who walked on stage, leaving the last group photo of the three of them in public.
The summit also witnessed the ups and downs of IT leaders. For example, in 2016, Jia Yueting, who was suffocated by his dreams, appeared at the summit for the first time, and Jia Yueting, who relied on ecological rebellion, was very well paid, and he was on the same stage with Ma Huateng and Yang Yuanqing in his first appearance. Since then, everyone knows the story of LETV, not to mention that Jia Yueting came to the meeting, and never even came back.
2015It was Yu Chengdong's first time to participate in the conference, although Huawei Mate7 has been released, but Huawei mobile phones were still low-end images at that time, Yu Chengdong's speech did not make too many waves, and the image of the big mouth was not so deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. But four years later, when Yu Chengdong participated in the conference for the second time, Huawei's revenue exceeded 100 billion US dollars, and Huawei mobile phones sold a record 240 million units.
03
In the early years, Wu Ying was also worried that the Wuzhen Internet Conference would divert some heavyweight guests, but fortunately, the Internet Conference was basically held in autumn and winter, and the IT Leaders Summit was held in the summer every year, which had little impact on each other.
The most recent IT Leaders Summit was held in 2019, featuring Pony Ma and Chengdong Yu.
Tencent, which has just undergone the "930 Transformation", has started the journey of the industrial Internet, established the CSIG business group, and officially entered the ToB track. Four years later, for the first time, the revenue of Tencent's ToB business became Tencent's largest revenue segment.
This year, although Huawei was suppressed by the United States, its revenue hit a record high, and Yu Chengdong's consumer BG was even more prosperous, accounting for half of Huawei's country for the first time, and the sales of mobile phones exceeded 240 million.
But since the beginning of this year, the Internet economy has encountered troubles, and the IT Leaders Summit has also suffered many setbacks. It has not been held since 2020, and it has been postponed due to the epidemic in previous years, and the official announcement has been released, and the time has been set, but in the end it had to be canceled.
And Wu Ying, the organizer of the game, also encountered some trouble. After Wu Ying was out of UTStarcom, he devoted himself to the capital market, but he did not invest in too many outstanding projects, most of which were concentrated in the communication industry, but missed the Internet outlet.
In May 2023, Wu Ying was also restricted from high consumption because its listed company Zhongjia Bochuang failed to fulfill its obligations under effective legal documents in accordance with regulations. And Zhongjia Bochuang has also been put on the hat of ST.
However, behind the suspension of the IT Leaders Summit, the tide of the times is turning, and the era of artificial intelligence is accelerating. The first batch of IT leaders gradually retreated from the business world to the second line, BAT's edge is not as good as before, and Musk is even asking, where did Jack go? And Zhang Yiming, Wang Xing, Huang Zheng and other mobile Internet upstarts have never liked to show their heads and rarely participate in these activities. This is also destined to make it difficult for the IT Leaders Summit to maintain the glory and popularity of the early years.
04
The east wind blew thousands of miles away on the banks of the Huangpu River.
On July 4, 2024, it was 38 degrees Celsius in Shanghai, and it was noon, but the Expo Center on the banks of the Huangpu River was still crowded. In order to cool down the venue, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence is also inseparable from the most primitive ice cubes. In the past two years, artificial intelligence, represented by large models, has been hotter than the weather in Shanghai. The lively scene once made people sigh that the innovation and entrepreneurship boom of the mobile Internet has returned.
The metaverse, which was the protagonist of the WAIC conference two years ago, has been moved to the remote second floor, and the prime location on the first floor is almost a sea of large models. But there are also unlucky, Minimax is a large model star startup company in China, originally wanted to occupy the C position at the entrance of the exhibition hall, but it is said that the bet was in the wrong position, the door was open on the other side, and Minimax was in the corner instead.
In recent years, there have been few industry conferences that have been so hot. This year's WAIC is hotter than in previous years, and tickets for free entry have begun to be charged this year, and scalpers have even scalped tickets on the roadside.
All this is not so much the charm of the magic capital, but the charm of the large model.
Unlike last year, when everyone rushed to release large models, this year, everyone is looking for landing and application scenarios, emphasizing Agent, emphasizing making money, and few people talk about the size of their model parameters.
The discussion of large models is becoming more and more in-depth, including whether Scaling Law will continue to work, whether the business model is 2B or 2C, whether to choose open source or closed source, and how to govern models and data, and each topic is fiercely contested.
The years of burning passion belonging to the Internet have passed, but no one wants to lose their voice in the age of AI. The familiar faces of the IT Leadership Summit are frequently present at WAIC. The long-awaited famous scene began to move north.
Robin Li is still a frequent visitor to WAIC, except for 2023, when he was unable to attend the conference because he was abroad, he came every time to consolidate the image of AI evangelist. This year, Robin Li also said that the open source model is an IQ tax, which has caused dissatisfaction among many open source model manufacturers. Fu Sheng even publicly shot back by saying that the paid closed-source model is the IQ tax.
When the discourse system goes beyond the scope of the Internet, it seems that it is more difficult to reach a consensus on everyone's cognition. In 2019, the two bigwigs of Lao Ma's family had a 45-minute conversation on WAIC. At that time, Musk's Shanghai Gigafactory was already under construction, and the speed of China was an eye-opener for Musk. And Shanghai is the home of the conference, and Musk has been very active. Mr. Ma had officially retired from Alibaba the year before, when he was co-chair of the UN's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.
In fact, both of them are talking awkwardly, one is interested in Mars and the other is interested in Earth. Jack Ma believes that machines cannot be smarter than people because machines were invented by humans. But Elon Ma felt that we could create something smarter than we were, and they didn't have to be human.
In this dialogue, Ma Yun's performance has been criticized by many people. But putting aside the limitations of history, the tuyere is brewing.
The tide of the industry is rapidly surging towards artificial intelligence. The development history of artificial intelligence is actually earlier than the development history of the Internet, but in the past few AI development stages, everyone's impression is still at the stage of playing chess and Go.
The advent of ChatGPT shattered the peace and showed what AI speed is. It took less than four months for Nvidia, which sold shovels, to go from a market value of $2 trillion to $3 trillion, and Nvidia grew faster than all the previous generation of Internet companies. It took ChatGPT just two months to go from 0 to 100 million users, while it took seven years for the entire internet to reach 100 million users.
Unlike the IT Leaders Summit, which is a stage for IT bigwigs, star entrepreneurs in the AI era also attract countless attention. At the Beijing Zhiyuan Conference, which is known as the "Spring Festival Gala of the AI industry", Yang Zhilin, who is only 31 years old, enjoyed the treatment of an entrepreneurial star, was surrounded by the audience, and finally got out with the assistance of the staff.
Yang Zhilin is a native of Shantou and is keen on doing business locally, but Yang Zhilin is very good at studying, he is the top science student in Shantou City's college entrance examination, and he is also the only student in Shantou who was admitted to Tsinghua University that year. I have to sigh that in Shantou, which emphasizes business and light literature, education is indeed a shortcoming. Zhuhai, which is also a special economic zone, had 6 students admitted to Tsinghua University in Zhuhai No. 1 Middle School alone this year.
Xie Saining, a well-known young AI scholar, was also the target of the siege, he was rumored to be one of the inventors of Sora before, but his experience in overseas factories and a number of high-quality papers have made him well-known in the circle. He also had a conversation with the head of Sora at the KLCII conference.
The Dark Side of the Moon, Zhipu, Minimax, Baichuan Intelligence, Step Star and Zero One Things have become the hottest large-scale model startups at the moment. Except for Zhipu and Minimax, the other four were only established in the first half of 2023, but they all received hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment, and quickly grew into unicorns. Almost all VCs are afraid of missing this round of outlets, except for Zhu Xiaohu.
Dai Qionghai, dean of the School of Information Science and Technology of Tsinghua University, once said, "When everyone mentions the Internet, it is Ali, Tencent, Baidu, and it will not be such a model in the future. ”
From finance to industry, from education to healthcare, from office to life and entertainment, AI is reimagining everything. Just as everyone wanted to have a ticket when the tide of mobile Internet arrived, everyone also wants to have a ticket for AI now.
Wang Jian, the founder of Alibaba Cloud, said very truthfully, disruptive technology will definitely give birth to giants, and at the same time, there will be the rebirth of the original large companies. While paying attention to how large companies are reborn, they are also paying more attention to which startups will use revolutionary tools to grow into giants in the new era.
05
Cities, like businesses, will change drastically in a short period of time in the face of the tide of the times. When the various summits held in other cities are no longer as lively as they used to be, various AI summits have begun to emerge.
In 2018, Beijing and Shanghai were working in the field of artificial intelligence almost simultaneously, and the competition between cities has begun.
This year, the first World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was held in Shanghai, with a high standard and co-sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Government and a number of ministries and commissions. One of the major backgrounds of the Shanghai meeting is that the first national artificial intelligence development plan was introduced, and artificial intelligence was also written into the government work report for the first time, becoming a national strategy.
In fact, it was also this year that the theme of the IT Leaders Summit, which has always been closely following the trend, was also "Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges for China". It's just that at that time, it was still in the context of Alpha Dog's victory over Go champion Lee Sedol, and there was a round of artificial intelligence boom, and the technical route was not the same thing as the current hot large model.
Shanghai, which has missed the wave of the Internet, has shown itself very positive about artificial intelligence, not only listing artificial intelligence, integrated circuits and biomedicine as the three emerging industries in Shanghai, creating a new Shanghai highland, and vowing to turn the magic capital into a "model capital"; Moreover, every year, the artificial intelligence strategy consulting expert meeting is held, and the leader of the municipal party committee or the municipal government is presided, and the bigwigs from academia and industry across the country are invited to come and offer wisdom and suggestions, such as the theme set in 2023 is "Shanghai as a general artificial intelligence".
To do things in an international metropolis is to be confident. Various policies, regulations and industry standards have taken the lead in the country, and Shanghai has specially designated three artificial intelligence application pilot zones, including Pudong, to give money and land to senior expert titles, and also organize leading cadres to learn how to promote the high-quality development of artificial intelligence. In 2019, SenseTime also moved its headquarters from Beijing to Shanghai.
Thousands of miles away, Beijing is also making efforts at the same time, shouting the slogan of building the first AI city. Beijing has this confidence, according to the 117 large models filed by the Cyberspace Administration of China, Beijing accounts for 51; 6 large-scale unicorns, 5 in Beijing.
Also in 2018, Beijing released the Beijing Zhiyuan Action Plan, relying on Beijing's universities, research institutes and science and technology giants to establish the Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. In the words of Microsoft President Smith, at present, in the field of artificial intelligence, three companies in the world are at the absolute forefront, one is OpenAI, the second is Google, and the third is Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Very high rating. Wang Xiaochuan called it the Whampoa Military Academy of the large model, and many of the backbone of the large model project are related to this institution.
But as Beijing and Shanghai strive to seize the AI opportunity, some delicate situations are also happening. Musk, an old friend of the Chinese, did not appear at this year's WAIC, and he appeared at last year's WAIC by video, and said that he was looking forward to the next session to attend the conference, but only an avant-garde Tesla pickup truck and a humanoid robot Optimus covered by a glass cabinet came to the scene. Well-known overseas AI companies and well-known AI entrepreneurs have also failed to appear. Technology without borders is being challenged more and more by reality.
The AI era may be more powerful than any previous era, but it is no longer just a contest between companies and capital, but also between cities and even countries.