The intelligent revolution is coming. See how the world’s five largest AI giants respond?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Harvard Business Review” (ID: hbrchinese), Author Shi Ran | Contributor to the Chinese version of Harvard Business Review .
The 2019 Artificial Intelligence Special Investigation Report (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”) initiated by the Chinese version of the Harvard Business Review has recently concluded. In the fourth quarter of 2019, we conducted a survey of 200 company heads / founders, managers and ordinary employees of the artificial intelligence industry and enterprises. All respondents had a full understanding of the industry’s technology and industry development.
In conjunction with this sample survey, we also interviewed professionals in mainstream consulting institutions around the world and experts in artificial intelligence transformation in various industries.
The topics of our investigation include: the development trend of various artificial intelligence technologies, the status of industrial landing and development prospects, and the comprehensive development strength of global artificial intelligence leaders.
The survey shows to a certain extent the staged characteristics of the development of the global artificial intelligence industry and the trend expectations for the next stage. Based on the research topics and related scores, we selected the “2019 Top 5 Global AI Companies”. The companies on the list are: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Baidu, and Amazon.
They lead the commercial implementation, development and transformation of this wave of artificial intelligence technology worldwide. The change mainly includes three levels: the first layer is enterprise change. When artificial intelligence technology participates in enterprise management processes and production processes, the trend of digitalization of enterprises is becoming increasingly apparent, and some enterprises have achieved more mature smart applications; the second layer is industry change The changes brought about by artificial intelligence technology have caused a fundamental change in the upstream and downstream relationships of the traditional industry chain. The third layer is the transformation of manpower. The application of new technologies such as artificial intelligence will improve the efficiency of information utilization and liberate humanity from simple and repeated positions. Focus on more creative work.
What are the five biggest AI giants all over the world?
In the field of technology, the giants are busy doing two things in 2019. One is to lay a solid foundation in the basic areas of AI such as algorithms, computing power, and data; the other is to accelerate the pace of technology landing and ecological expansion.
Past numberIn 2009, domestic and foreign platform giants successively launched artificial intelligence, and basically completed the layout in the areas of artificial intelligence’s Algorithm, Big data, and Compute.
Finally, there are five key factors of ABCDE for AI to form large-scale productivity: Algorithm (Algorithm), Big Data (Massive Data), Compute (Large-scale Computing Resources), Domain (Application in Professional Fields), and Ecosystem (Ecosystem).
If you take a closer look, the first three of ABC are the basic work of the layout of the technology platform giants, and DE is more personalized, requiring major platform giants to combine their gene endowments from different perspectives.
Specifically, in 2019, the majors of the major giants in ABC are to further enlarge the chassis. Most of the energy and resources are concentrated in the two dimensions of DE.
For example, Google, because of its comprehensive functions, can meet the wide needs of enterprises of different sizes. Google’s TensorFlow is currently the most widely used machine learning framework in the market.
In the Report, Google is considered to have a complete set of autonomous AI technologies, and among the world’s leading companies in these technologies, Google tops the list with a percentage of 19.4%. Then came Apple, Microsoft, Baidu, and Amazon.
Baidu, ranked fourth, is the only Chinese company in the top five in the world. China and the United States are the two global levels of artificial intelligence. The leading AI companies in the two countries are at the forefront of the deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities, but the specific technical capabilities are different. The biggest difference is that Chinese companies are generally inferior to the United States in their basic technology research and development capabilities.
Because of this, in 2019, while strengthening ecological and application scenarios, Baidu continued to make breakthroughs in basic technical capabilities such as algorithms and computing power. This is also the state that all Chinese technology platform giants deploying artificial intelligence are experiencing.
In 2019, Baidu’s brain made breakthroughs in algorithms and computing power, becoming a “soft and hard integrated AI large-scale production platform”, realizing the standardization, automation, and modularization of AI technology, and becoming the infrastructure of a smart economy. Language processing, deep learning and other sub-field technologies have reached global leading levels.
Sceneization is the next direction for AI
The major platform companies have figured out a lot of AI commercialization landing directions, but many are different
Today, the main and short-term goals of the entire industry are to encapsulate the existing and relatively mature AI model capabilities into commercial components, and to plug into existing industry applications and business processes to create large-scale Conditions of application.
The major companies have figured out a lot of feasible directions, and plan to start industrialization promotion in the next one to two years.
Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce platform, has created the world’s largestAfter the public cloud AWS, the comprehensive layout of artificial intelligence has had an irreversible positive impact on the two major businesses of this platform giant.
As an e-commerce platform, Amazon has been using AI technology for e-commerce product recommendations for a long time, but this is only the primary application scenario of AI. With the continuous progress of machine learning technology, Amazon has begun to deepen AI technology into every aspect of the company’s operation. In addition to the high-level things such as robots, data centers, and clouds, Amazon has also directly landed on the C-end link, including smart retail Amazon Go, a full-chain solution, broke the wall between software companies and hardware companies, and launched the consumer electronics smart speaker Echo based on cloud and AI speech recognition technology.
On the B-side, Amazon’s AI strength should not be underestimated. At present, Amazon’s AI product lines include: Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition, which are respectively positioned to write natural human-computer interaction, voice conversion services, and image recognition.
In December 2019, Amazon launched five new AI services, including machine learning-driven enterprise search, code review and analysis, fraud detection, medical transcription, and manual review of AI predictions. At the same time, Inferentia, the first AI chip, was also released.
Amazon is the first company to see the huge role of cloud services in the business world. In 2006, Amazon AWS launched cloud service functions. At present, AWS has more than 100 million users worldwide. In 2019, it has 1 billion active users. Apple has also become an AWS customer. Not only does AWS provide services to these customers, but also the data uploaded to the cloud is also continuously optimizing the cloud platform through machine learning.
A senior technical person in the field of artificial intelligence has evaluated that if it is evaluated from the perspective of technology industrialization, the current trend of homogenization of the AI cloud application competition among the major Chinese giants is becoming increasingly apparent. There is no obvious gap between the capabilities of various companies. If you look closely, Baidu can provide relatively rich services relying on years of technological accumulation.
In 2019, Baidu made a pre-judgment of AI entering the industrialization stage and formulated a corresponding industrial intelligent action line: the core is to realize the industrialization of AI technology itself, hoping to achieve industrial-scale production, provide industrial-level costs, The switch to industrial scale has accelerated the intelligent upgrading of various industries.
To achieve the above goals is not easy. Whether it is at the data level, algorithm level or computing power level, many improvements have to be made. Baidu has set out to establish a data system and improve its technical system.
Not only Amazon and Baidu, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, but also domestic giants such as Ali and Tencent have some commonalities on the road to commercialization of AI.
The first is to control the entrance through an open platform. Use its own technology and resources to build a foundationThe platform achieves a win-win result with small and medium-sized enterprises. The latter contributes to the ecological prosperity of the former, and the former saves the latter’s investment in basic technology and focuses on applications.
Second, the company’s genes determine the direction of AI development. Google has the technological advantage, focusing on generalization and adapting to the entire industry; Amazon is focusing on e-commerce + cloud and focusing on productization; Facebook is growing up in an open new-generation Internet environment. The AI path is open and open source. , Data sets and tools; Apple’s own business model is a “soft + hard” relatively closed system, and the AI path is both productive and relatively closed.
Make AI visible and touchable
The future of artificial intelligence is unquestioned, and people are more concerned about whether they can catch the express train to the future
The survey results of the “Report” show that interviewees generally believe that the top five important factors for the development of the AI industry are mainly from the industry’s maturity and customer acceptance. When there is complete ecological support for upstream and downstream and 5G commercial use, it will be able to upgrade the human-computer interaction experience and reduce product production costs, thereby increasing consumer acceptance.
A technical executive of a large Chinese platform company interviewed by the Chinese version of “Harvard Business Review” stated that in 2019, all companies are focusing on AI refinement and sceneization, and everyone has a lot of new landings. Scenes, but there are no obvious core technology breakthroughs, “I ’m talking about faster, stronger, and easier to use, but the core technology is basically the same as the previous two years.”
This is a normal phenomenon of technological development and industrial iterative cycles. Technological progress brings industrial prosperity, and industrial prosperity feeds back technological progress, especially in high-tech industries.
In 2020, the research on artificial intelligence technology will go further. Some research institutions believe that artificial intelligence will evolve from the 1.0 era of cognitive intelligence to the 2.0 era of cognitive intelligence. How to maintain the advantages of big data intelligence while giving machines common sense and causal logic reasoning capabilities to achieve cognitive intelligence.
In addition, the trend of integration of computing and storage is expected to break through the bottleneck of AI computing power. The use of AI technology to protect data privacy is becoming a new technology hotspot.
IBM’s prediction is that the improved understanding of artificial intelligence will expand the scope of application. Next year, more artificial intelligence systems will begin to rely on “neuro-symbolic” technology that combines learning ability and logic.
5G is also a positive variable that promotes artificial intelligence technology to take a step forward and further commercialize it.
The essence of 5G is stronger data transmission capabilities. IoT devices will also collect more data. With the help of 5G transmission to the edge and the cloud for AI learning, AI will have more raw materials, that is, “data”.
The full commercialization of 5G in 2020 will further accelerate the development of AI. 5G has three characteristics of low latency, high bandwidth and large capacity., AI, VR / AR and other related applications have created network conditions and will create more landing scenarios for AI.
Edge computing, cloud collaboration, and distributed computing will have a better network foundation, creating a complete underlying computing foundation for AI.
The iteration of artificial intelligence technology itself and the blessing of 5G will further promote the process of commercialization of artificial intelligence.
“Report” survey results believe that medical care, mobile phones and the Internet, and home furnishings are considered the top three most promising application scenarios in the next stage.
The three industries of medical industry, Internet and home furnishings naturally have data attributes, and it is recognized as one of the best industries in the first batch of artificial intelligence. In addition, financial securities, industry, consumer and government industries are also areas where the giants have developed more and have a promising future. The common characteristics of these industries are threefold: first, the data foundation is good; second, the demand is strong and the technology can be copied; third, it is easier to find rich scenes that can be implemented.
Taking the medical industry as an example, in recent years, traditional medical giants and technology giants have been actively setting up this field: Johnson & Johnson and Siemens have deployed multiple medical AI fields including robotics, imaging, and assisted diagnosis. Among the giants, IBM, Google, and domestic companies such as Baidu and Tencent also have new achievements in the field of medical AI. With the entry of giants, industry consolidation has further intensified.
Data from market research organization Global Market Insights shows that drug discovery will occupy more than 35% of the largest market share in smart medicine, and revenue will exceed $ 40 billion by 2024; medical imaging and diagnostic technologies will become 2017-2022 The fastest-growing industry in the smart medical field is expected to reach $ 25 billion by 2024, a growth rate of over 40%.
However, it is foreseeable that artificial intelligence will enter the medical industry. It will be a long process that gradually extends from the extension to the core. In the medical industry in 2018, there are already thousands of top three hospitals in China introducing AI products. Unclear industry pain points remain. A huge business opportunity left for the platform giants is how to find a suitable path to coexist and win-win with the domestic medical industry.
However, which industries to choose and which industries to focus on, different giants have different considerations. Generally, the important factor that determines their strategic choice is which industries their own advantages are suitable for.
In today’s world, technology is undergoing a process of changing from “hard” to “soft”. When the soft power of artificial intelligence and the traditional industry are superimposed, which is the so-called intelligent revolution, it is foreseeable that from 2020, it will be integrated into our production and life, visible and tangible.