Li Gen is from The Temple of Consort
Qubits reports | Official account QbitAI
September 30, 2020, is not Wang Xiaochuan's last day as CEO of Sogou.
This is his 20th year in Sohu, and the 10th year of sogou spin-off and independent operation.
But from this day on, the silent farewell is actually quietly proceeding.
On the occasion of the 3-year listing on the New York Stock Exchange IPO, Sogou officially announced the opening of privatization, and pointed to the clear:
Accepted Tencent's takeover offer and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent.
Wang Xiaochuan was as usual. As usual, he appeared in the Sohu Building and appeared in public as the CEO of Sogou.
The outside world even expects that after the merger into Tencent, China's Internet jianghu will usher in the combination of technology Wang Xiaochuan and product Zhang Xiaolong.
It wasn't until a year later that a long-brewed farewell letter was released.
Wang Xiaochuan announced his decision in it:
Say goodbye to Sogou, say goodbye to Sohu, and do not join Tencent.
He wants to return to the jianghu, he wants to start a business again, and he wants to use technology to practice the worldview again.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="13" > Who promoted Tencent's acquisition of Sogou? </h1>
Sogou's incorporation into Tencent is reasonable, but not unexpected.
Because even if it is not wholly acquired, Sogou is already inseparable from Tencent.
But after 7 years of shareholding, he chose to swallow it completely and integrate with his own business from the outside in... Unexpectedly, many people.
The "idea" was proposed by Wang Xiaochuan.
But this "idea" is not the idea of letting Tencent wholly acquire Sogou, but the idea that Sogou wants to change.
The specific reason is unknown, but the urgency has triggered heated public opinion.
At the end of 2019, a year after Sogou was listed, some Sogou employees anonymously complained on the Internet, saying that the company began to strengthen the management of working hours, disguised optimization and layoffs, so it was only a perfunctory response.
Unexpectedly, Wang Xiaochuan not only paid attention to it, but also hit back with his real name.
He responded that there had never been such a request, and that the company had opinions on either feedback and suggestions, or adaptation, anonymous tongue chewing behind the scenes, getting by and getting by... Be responsible for others and yourself and should leave.
Because of the excitement, Wang Xiaochuan's words were fierce and on the hot search.
And such a situation, in the decades when Wang Xiaochuan became a public figure, was very rare.
He was known for his gentleness, and those who knew or worked with him rarely saw him angry and angry... Even he has a sense of indisputable and obedient strength, not without a trough, but rarely revealed to the outside world.
So at that time, many people were confused:
What happened to Ogawa?
But now that I look back and connect the dots into lines, the emotions and performances at that moment have an explanation—
Everything is because of care and unwillingness.
IPO listing is undoubtedly a milestone for Sogou, but it does not mean that it can lie flat on this.
From the perspective of the external situation, the intelligent technology with AI as the core is getting deeper and deeper, showing the potential and value of the industry in an all-round way, and a new wave of technological dividends and opportunities is in front of us.
And if the internal loss of initiative, the era-level opportunities are just mirror flowers and moons.
In light of everything that happened later, Wang Xiaochuan's "idea" at least includes:
Plan a bigger business.
Set stronger incentives.
And the need for greater capital leverage.
But even so, it will eventually lead to the result of Tencent's wholly-owned acquisition, which is surprising.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="38" > godfather, emperor Taishang, and Sogou fate</h1>
The acquisition of one company by another seems like a normal event in the business world.
What's more, Tencent has long been Sogou's largest external shareholder.
If you don't know the history of Sogou, you can't empathize with this kind of "accident".
The situation of Sogou is a bit complicated.
Unlike other unicorn companies, Sogou is an innovative and successful independent company under Sohu, and Sohu is not only The "biological father" of Sogou, but also the person with the largest right to speak.
One of the most fundamental clues is Sohu's heart knot, or more bluntly:
Zhang Chaoyang's heart knot.
So even if Tencent invested in shares in 2013 with full sincerity and huge capital, Sogou only introduced external capital and allies.
Sogou's ownership of Sohu cannot be shaken and has never changed.
Later, Sogou's business was on a steady track, and everything was even more unsatisfactory, and no one thought about other possibilities for Sogou in addition to IPO, as well as capital level.
Behind this possibility involves the balance and game of interests of the three parties -
Wang Xiaochuan is the representative of the core management.
The external major shareholder represented by Tencent.
The concerted action force of Zhang Chaoyang and Sohu.
And the most crucial thing is Zhang Chaoyang's will.
In Wang Xiaochuan's farewell letter, his gratitude to Zhang Chaoyang overflowed into words, calling him his "spiritual godfather."
But in the history of Sogou's development, Zhang Chaoyang's role is also as insurmountable as the "Emperor Taishang".
Emperor Taishang even came to the real one - you can abandon sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan.
In 2008, when Wang Xiaochuan put forward the "input method - search - browser" three-stage rocket idea, thinking that only by doing a browser can it be successfully searched, Zhang Chaoyang did not recognize it, and also left a classic rhetorical question -
"IE has a 60% market share, why hasn't Microsoft's Bing succeeded?"
Zhang Chaoyang felt that Wang Xiaochuan was playing "witchcraft", and then Wang Xiaochuan was directly deprived of "military power" and began an 18-month snubbed career.
This kind of snub is almost a disguised eviction order.
And at that time, it seemed that Wang Xiaochuan's departure from Sohu was only a countdown.
Externally, rumors of Wang Xiaochuan becoming Baidu's CTO have intensified. Internally, Sohu's marketing public relations department even made a statement in response.
The later turnaround was related to the emergence of Zhou Hongyi.
Lao Zhou was later the number one enemy of Wang Xiaochuan's breakthrough led by Sogou, and the main external reason for Wang Xiaochuan's marriage to Ali and Qianli's move from Tencent to rescue troops.
But in the year when Wang Xiaochuan and Zhang Chaoyang were most deeply estranged, it was rumored that Zhou Hongyi made three suggestions to Zhang Chaoyang:
First, the search you don't understand, you have to split it out to do.
Second, I have a browser, browser + search can be done.
Third, the suitable CEO is Wang Xiaochuan, he understands the technology, and the technical staff also listens to him.
Therefore, the fate of Sogou, the biggest decision-making power, has actually been in the hands of Zhang Chaoyang.
In the past decade, sogou and Qihoo 360, Ali, Tencent, and independent IPOs and other capital events, are inseparable from the main line of Zhang Chaoyang, he does not sell, no one has any way.
Why did Zhang Chaoyang nod his head in tencent's wholly-owned acquisition intention this time?
Zhang Chaoyang himself did not explain.
However, from the perspective of Sohu's strategic focus in recent years, it is not difficult to find some clues.
The most important thing may be that the knot has been solved and there is no longer the obsession of "Internet C bit".
As the first generation of hegemony of China's Internet, Sohu has innovated the new wave of the times in the fields of portals, videos, games and search.
But the years are merciless, the new people wave after wave, the new wave is higher than the wave, the jianghu has never seen the new people laughing, sohu once had the protagonist position and aura, has not been retained, but also gradually drifted away.
For Sohu, there used to be Sogou, which was a part of the strategic arch guard.
But now, that meaning is decaying.
The management of Sogou and Sohu are very clear that the value of Sogou's development to Sohu is quantitatively possible, but the qualitative leap has been determined.
Fate has been written in the dark.
It's nothing more than price.
And Tencent asked for $3.5 billion, high and low, not good evaluation.
But After this cash out, Sohu and Zhang Chaoyang cashed out, and their book revenue alone was $1.18 billion. In contrast, Sohu's total market capitalization is only more than $800 million.
On the contrary, for Tencent and sogou, the value can be more scarce at this moment.
This Sogou merger and acquisition entered the Tencent platform and content business group (PCG), which is the base camp of Tencent's content ecology and the frontline of Tit-for-tat confrontation between Tencent and ByteDance.
Sogou's search, input method, and AI technology's information entry and distribution capabilities are of great significance to Tencent at present.
What's more, Tencent may not have expected that Sogou actually got rid of the "non-selling" state.
If not now, how long will it be?
In the end, the only party left was almost only Sogou Wang Xiaochuan.
In Sogou's right to speak, Wang Xiaochuan shares 5%, he is the founder and CEO of Sogou, is the brain center of Sogou, but most of the time he lacks decisive voice.
Therefore, this "innate condition", Tencent's acquisition, for Wang Xiaochuan, may be the best destination, and there is no reason to refuse.
In his farewell letter, he wrote clearly:
It was a "happy goodbye that will boost a new journey of life." ”
His next goal is also clear:
Love your loved ones with greater power.
Go in search of a belated love.
We will continue our curiosity about life sciences over the past two decades, and hope to contribute to the development of life sciences and medicine and make a little contribution to public health.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="98" > Wang Xiaochuan's entrepreneurial direction</h1>
Earlier, a new company called Wuji Technology also surfaced, with Wang Xiaochuan 100% controlled.
In the scope of business, including technology development, technical consulting, software development, basic software services, application software services, computer system services, etc.
Because the name is pronounced "5G", but also because of the scope of business, there is speculation that this is a sign that Wang Xiaochuan wants to enter the 5G industry.
However, if you are familiar with Wang Xiaochuan, it is not difficult to lock in his new direction:
It is inseparable from two major coordinate axes.
One is what he calls life sciences, medicine and health.
Another big axis is technology, or more accurately, AI technology, or intelligent systems.
Combined with the current increasingly clear trend of AI+Science, it is not difficult to guess Wang Xiaochuan's Wujie technology direction - using AI to reveal and discover more basic principles, cognition and breakthroughs in the field of life sciences.
AI+Science?
Typical examples such as AlphaFold 2 can predict the structure of 98.5% of human proteins in a short period of time, while decades of efforts by scientists have only covered 17% of amino acid residues in human protein sequences.
Like the "great force" acting on other fields, AI systems are also setting off a bigger storm in the field of basic science.
And the paradigm of discovery of the laws of human science is being rewritten.
Previously, human beings' laws and cognition of the objective world were deduced and revealed by unborn geniuses after a long period of observation and accumulation of experience.
Newton's law of universal gravitation. Einstein to relativity.
But until these human geniuses were revealed, these scientific laws were not without operation.
And Newton and Einstein, the most remarkable significance, is to be able to rough and refined, to remove the false and true, to connect the dots into a line, to reveal the essential law behind the layers of phenomena, to reveal.
But now, AI is also beginning to show such role and value.
Different from the human brain, AI systems can calculate and reason about more complex big data, and finally be able to peel back the cocoon and give the forces and objective laws behind the complexity.
That is to say, AI systems can not only apply laws and solve problems, but also find laws in the general direction architecture.
Whether it's AlphaFold 2, or GPT-3, or the big model, big computing that has become the mainstream consensus in the past two years...
In fact, it is all a recognition of this path.
If ai systems can be like particle colliders, under big data, big calculations and big models, "bumping" something out...
So why not let AI help humans discover the law first, and then let humans verify and explain it?
Interestingly, this consensus on the idea of the big model in the past two years was actually pointed out by Wang Xiaochuan on the day AlphaGo was exposed.
In 2016, AlphaGo was born, shaking the world, and everyone was amazed that the AI system created by DeepMind could challenge the highest level of human intelligence games... And beyond humans.
But what excites Wang Xiaochuan is not only the surpassing of humans in Go.
He made a very optimistic statement at the time: AI can repeat the history of human evolution, even the history of the evolution of the universe.
At that time, it was widely believed that this young and technically strong man had some excessive technical optimism.
But looking back now, it's all based on accurate insights based on a deep understanding of technology.
In addition, Wang Xiaochuan also shared another controversial point.
He believes that AI may also complete the true connection and reshaping of tradition and modernity, East and West in this era.
For example, Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Or to put it another way: traditional Oriental medicine.
In the context of modern public opinion, talking about Traditional Chinese and Western medicine is often prone to falling into a war of words between the party and the party.
But what Wang Xiaochuan proposed is that in traditional medicine based on empiricism, are there some objective laws that modern medicine has not yet been able to discover and explain?
For example, the "cold" and "heat" often spoken of in Chinese medicine, is it possible that it is an undiscovered "enzyme" or "microflora"?
With the help of AI, if you can build a computing high-complexity system, and then carry out verification around this direction...
Once it is found that there is a relevant flora, the biological history will be rewritten, and the life sciences-related industry will be subversively reshaped.
Drugs and treatments will be re-divided around the "cold \ heat" of the two sexes.
This kind of discovery is not unprecedented in human history, and this is the case with the wave-particle duality of light.
So Wang Xiaochuan's re-departure, he has clarified the field of life sciences and medical health...
That more specific landing may be related to this direction.
And this is also a continuation of Wang Xiaochuan's major at Tsinghua.
Wang Xiaochuan in the impression of the outside world is a technical genius, the founder of Sogou, and the creator of the national input method product...
But Wang Xiaochuan's profession is rarely known.
When Wang Xiaochuan was a graduate student at Tsinghua University, he chose the direction of high-performance computing.
The so-called high-performance computing is to develop and create a computer with more powerful computing power through the design of the architecture.
What can such a computer do?
For example, one of the classic subjects, weather forecasting.
In the subject, weather forecasting is seen as a simulation system that is combed through a system of dimensional granularity in the real world and then able to output accurate predictions after input and calculation.
Why is weather forecasting difficult?
The dimensions, impact factors, and precision involved are challenging, and subtle data changes in any one of them can have an impact on the accuracy of the final result.
The well-known "butterfly effect" is essentially a visual description of this challenge.
In addition, from the perspective of flipping, from the result backwards, it is possible to derive another layer of directional law of the avenue to jane:
In our world, in the complexity of chaos and uncertainty, there is a reliable certainty behind it.
Isn't there a bit of metaphysical philosophical flavor?
Interestingly, Wang Xiaochuan has fully expressed such a world view.
In that public conversation with Xu Zhiyuan, he shared his infrastructure system for looking at everything in the world.
In his architecture, the subjective and objective world is perceived on three levels:
The first is the objective physical world.
The second is the world of life genes.
The third is the world of subjective consciousness.
This is different from past scientific and philosophical thinking.
In the past, either we focused on the objective world and formed a materialistic scientific worldview.
Either it is to pay attention to the level of thinking at the level of consciousness, and it will focus on the idealistic side.
But for the living world, due to the study of life sciences and DNA, it has not been included in the system of understanding the world before and has not been taken seriously.
Wang Xiaochuan hinted in that interview that the history and future of the East and the West, the humanities and sciences, have the possibility of great unification.
In the historical accumulation of the Past East, there were empirical expressions for many objective understandings, forming common sense, but they could not be explained by current scientific principles.
The reason boils down to —
On the one hand, it may be that a more macroscopic, high-dimensional worldview is missing.
On the other hand, there is also a lack of help from more powerful computing power and algorithmic models.
And now, it seems like it's time.
A Chinese proverb is often used by Wang Xiaochuan as an example:
August 15, 15 snow lanterns.
This remote correlation on a spatial dimension spanning more than 150 days... How was the ancient Chinese folk, who lacked natural science tools and cognition, recognized?
Uncovering the "certainty behind this complex uncertainty system" made him interested.
In fact, there is no one more suitable than Wang Xiaochuan.
He was interested, and what he put into practice was his own worldview.
And in the past 20 years, his accumulated ability and reputation in the jianghu have also supported him to use more leverage to promote this practice.
This leverage includes capital, but also connections and trust.
Character is Wang Xiaochuan's best pass.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="180" > the contradiction and optimal solution of Wang Xiaochuan</h1>
What kind of character does Wang Xiaochuan have?
A character that takes 20 years to see clearly.
Wang Xiaochuan seems to be not difficult to recognize.
After his Sogou farewell letter was issued, whether it was Sogou executives, ordinary employees, or simply people who had intersected, they all expressed their gratitude and respect for him.
Many people talk about Wang Xiaochuan, and they can always share one or two examples of him being nice. He was so gracious.
But Wang Xiaochuan seemed to have a hard time understanding.
It's hard to understand his worldview, his persistence over the past 20 years— it doesn't match the strongest brain he's shown early on.
Wang Xiaochuan was born in 1978, which is a key node in China's rejuvenation.
And because of the call of the times that "computer popularization should start from the doll", there is a foundation for the environment, and he showed interest in computers when he was a teenager.
Wang Xiaochuan did indeed cash in on his talent.
In Hungary in 1996, he led the Chinese IOI (Informatics Olympiad) national team, achieving a historic record of winning the gold medal for all employees, and truly opening an IOI era that belonged to China.
Later, he was sent to Tsinghua, because the internship unit ChinaRen was acquired by Sohu, entered Sohu, and then became the youngest executive among China's Internet giants at a young age, and was known for its technical strength.
He was led by the spiritual godfather Zhang Chaoyang, so the team of six people wanted to destroy Baidu.
He was also once exiled by the "Taishang Emperor" Zhang Chaoyang, the dominance of Sogou that he single-handedly created was taken away, and the cold palace wall was walled for 18 months...
But unexpectedly, in the years of unhappiness, he refused all temptations from the outside.
This is not like a teenager who is recognized as having the "strongest brain" and makes a choice based on calculation.
Junjie knows the current affairs, and people must go to a high place.
Wang Xiaochuan's choice is not in the set of optimal solutions.
In China's Internet jianghu, all the people who can be called "big guys" have extended an olive branch to him at the low point of Xiaochuan.
But in the end, he refused on the grounds of "sticking to it".
The reason is to have the best delivery of Sogou and to give an account to everyone who has "fought side by side".
Even in the eyes of the outside world, with Sogou's potential energy and Ogawa's share, it seems that it is impossible to accomplish this mission.
Even now, the number of mission deliveries, which is equal to Sogou's, is $3.5 billion.
This value does not seem to be outstanding compared with many Internet giants of the same period and the same group of genius companies.
In the business world of chasing up and killing, becoming a king and losing a Kou, it is easy to be despised.
But when Wang Xiaochuan sent a farewell letter, he said goodbye to 7714 Sohu days and nights, 4083 days Sogou CEO career, received congratulations and respect from everyone.
Because Wang Xiaochuan is so unique.
Not only does it mean that he has stirred up the industry storm, in the past 20 years, born in Tsinghua and raised in Sohu, resisted Baidu to fight Qihu, and broke Ali's marriage to Tencent, only this person is a "dog".
More crucially, in an era of bustling and profitable, in a highly commercial environment, in the increasingly professional Chinese Internet world, his choice and persistence in adversity can only be explained by combining the oriental spiritual background of his world view.
This oriental spirit appears in the gentleman's request of the "Inner Saint and Outer King", in the pursuit of "although thousands of people are looking forward to it", and also in the realm description of "the unity of knowledge and action".
It is precisely because of this spiritual and cultural influence that a founder of the strongest dominance of IOI China, a technical genius with the strongest brain with a high-speed operation and pros and cons decisions, has repeatedly made choices that know what cannot be done.
Wang Xiaochuan may have seen sogou's fate early on, but he worked hard to the end, adhering to the "outdated" principle and not shifting in the bustling external fame and fortune for 20 years.
So when his Sogou farewell letter was sent, it made people realize that in the world where we are so professional and commercial, we are accustomed to the fact that there are no people who have a beginning and a death, and there are still people who have spent the best 20 years to complete the initial commitment.
Wang Xiaochuan completed the final handover of Sogou and walked out of the Sohu Building on October 15, 2021.
The autumn scene in Beijing on this day is very similar to the day he first came, very similar...
— Ends —
Qubit QbitAI · Headline signing
Follow us and be the first to know about cutting-edge technology developments