Liu Qingfeng： Realizing artificial intelligence industry dividends with systematic innovation
The third wave of artificial intelligence is in the ascendant, and the 2021 Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference was held. How to realize the artificial intelligence industry dividend? How can artificial intelligence reach general intelligence in the future? How to maintain continuous source technology innovation and basic algorithm development? On June 5, Liu Qingfeng, chairperson of iFLYTEK, participated in the main forum of the conference and gave a keynote speech on "The latest progress of artificial intelligence technology and application practice", analyzing the development path of artificial intelligence industry dividend realization.
At the global artificial intelligence technology conference, iFLYTEK exhibited the rich application of artificial intelligence in urban, education, medical, industrial, office, life and other scenarios, leading the audience to enjoy the future of intelligent applications. Among them, the iFLYTEK industrial cloud platform, which has won the highest award in the national industrial field, has attracted wide attention, listening to sound barriers, releasing the six senses of industry, and refreshing the public’s imagination of intelligent industry.
Artificial intelligence core technology breakthrough, the era of intelligent interconnection of all things is coming
The rapid development of emerging technologies represented by artificial intelligence is driving human beings to enter the era of intelligent interconnection of all things. Human-machine interaction mode is increasingly replacing touch mode, and voice interaction and visual recognition are increasingly becoming the general trend of human-machine interaction mode development.
Combined with the background of the current era, Liu Qingfeng believes that the domestic industrial development will transition from the past demographic dividend period to the talent dividend period, and finally enter the application dividend stage of artificial intelligence. "Through artificial intelligence, social production efficiency will be greatly improved and product quality will be improved. It can be said that artificial intelligence is not only an indispensable means to build a happy China in the future, but also the core support for realizing an industrial power." For example, iFLYTEK’s silver-haired intelligent service platform can provide 24-hour care for the elderly, and iFLYTEK’s industrial cloud platform can effectively improve industrial cost reduction and efficiency.
Liu Qingfeng said that to realize the dividend of the artificial intelligence industry, we must first master the core technology of artificial intelligence and continue to break through. In the past three years, iFLYTEK has continued to deepen its technological research and development, and has continuously achieved results in the fields of automatic speech recognition, Text To Speech, and semantic understanding. It has won more than 30 world championships in international artificial intelligence related competitions.
The gradual maturity of artificial intelligence core technology promotes the landing of intelligent products, and human-machine interaction technology based on automatic speech recognition is becoming the entrance to the era of Internet of Everything. In 2020, iFLYTEK smart home voice module shipments reached 47.50 million, with an annualized growth rate of 150% in the past three years, showing a state of explosive growth.
Advances in artificial intelligence core technologies have also made it possible to achieve better results with smaller data. For example, in automatic speech recognition, the semi-supervised automatic speech recognition framework based on Text To Speech and self-training fuses supervised data with Text To Speech data and automatic speech recognition automatically labeled data to achieve better automatic speech recognition results.
"With 100 hours of supervised data, plus 10,000 hours of unlabeled speech, plus a large amount of text data synthesized speech, fusion training can achieve the effect of 10,000 hours of supervised data training." Liu Qingfeng pointed out that this makes artificial intelligence a very big step in achieving better results with smaller data.
From single-point technological breakthrough to systemic innovation artificial intelligence deeply empowers social rigid needs
The breakthrough of single-point technology is an important driving force for artificial intelligence to move forward. But to truly respond to major social propositions and solve the rigid needs of society, we must also break the situation through systematic innovation. In deploying the system innovation strategy, iFLYTEK has been deeply practiced in the fields of education, medical care, industry and enterprise digital transformation.
For example, in the field of smart education, in order to teach each child according to their aptitude, it is necessary to use the systematic integration of multiple single-point technologies. Take iFLYTEK’s smart education application as an example – OCR technology can analyze students’ classroom, homework performance and exam data; automatic scoring technology scores objective and subjective questions, summarizes students’ knowledge learning, and analyzes learning path planning; automatic speech recognition and semantic understanding technology help students review classrooms and train their thinking… The combination of multiple key technologies forms the internal running logic of smart education products.
Smart medical care is no exception. After learning a lot of medical knowledge and cases, iFLYTEK’s smart medical assistant passed the national medical practitioner qualification examination, scoring more than 96.3% of human candidates in the country. After being put into use in primary medical institutions, the smart medical assistant has carried out 200 million times of aided diagnosis an treatment, serving more than 30,000 grassroots doctors, effectively improving the diagnosis accuracy of grassroots doctors. Liu Qingfeng stressed: "This is not just a simple machine operating in the background, but a systematic innovation from a single point of technological breakthrough to aided diagnosis an treatment."
In promoting the digital transformation of enterprises, the systematic innovation of artificial intelligence also empowers the customer service, marketing, administration, finance and other aspects of enterprises. Liu Qingfeng concluded that there are three key elements to achieve systematic innovation: the key core technology effect should cross the technological gap and reach the application threshold; the depth of integration of key technologies in the innovation chain to stimulate innovation ability; the systematic analysis of major historical propositions and social propositions, and transform them into scientific problems.
Three Trends Insight into the Future of AI, Human-Machine Coexistence to Build a Better World
Talking about the prospects of artificial intelligence in the next ten years, Liu Qingfeng said that artificial intelligence will present three major development trends:
One is that the "black box" of deep learning becomes a "white box". Let deep learning evolve from focusing on the external results of the program to the internal logical structure of the program, from data structuring, network visualization to reasoning process, and derive "explainable artificial intelligence". This demand is very urgent at the moment and the future direction of artificial intelligence.
Second, the era of human-machine coexistence has arrived, and human-machine coexistence is more harmonious and natural; human-machine interaction will be more people-oriented, and artificial intelligence will be more adaptable to everyone’s development, including multi-modal perception and presentation, editable artificial intelligence, scene adaptive interaction, etc.
Third, artificial intelligence and interdisciplinary research will accelerate the promotion of artificial intelligence in more industries to trigger subversive innovation. Such as the combination of artificial intelligence and brain science, the basic algorithms of artificial intelligence will play a huge role in the fields of materials science and biopharmaceuticals.
With insights into the development of artificial intelligence in the next ten years through three major trends, the realization of artificial intelligence dividends is imminent. At the same time, Liu Qingfeng stressed that the realization of artificial intelligence dividends does not mean that artificial intelligence will replace humans. Even if artificial intelligence has the world’s knowledge, it does not have the characteristics of empathy, imagination, touching, and love that only humans possess.
"I believe that the future must belong to the new human beings who have mastered artificial intelligence. Building a better world with artificial intelligence requires all-round coordination from all walks of life. This is a great historical process that requires us to work together."