China has made important progress in the field of artificial intelligence, but it is still at the primary level

Artificial Intelligence, Pragmatic development is the right way (Attention)

Recently, the China Artificial Intelligence Conference hosted by the Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence was held in Shenzhen, using this high-end frontier exchange platform closely combined with industry, learning and research in the field of artificial intelligence, around the current hot topics such as the development of key core technologies, scholars and industry insiders have fully discussed.

The development of artificial intelligence has entered a new stage and will become a new generation of technology engine to promote future development

"In my opinion, if machines were originally used to replace human physical strength, then in the era of artificial intelligence, machines can be used to replace human intelligence and help people make judgments and decisions." Pu Muming, director of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.

In the past decade, the mobile Internet has flourished and changed every aspect of people's work and life. Artificial intelligence is considered to be a new generation of technology engine to promote economic and social development in the future.

Currently, the development of artificial intelligence has entered a new stage. Experts said that after more than 60 years of evolution, especially under the joint drive of new theories and technologies such as mobile Internet, big data, supercomputing, sensor network, brain science and the strong needs of economic and social development, artificial intelligence has accelerated development, showing new features such as deep learning, cross-border integration, man-machine collaboration, group intelligence openness, and autonomous control, and is causing a chain breakthrough. We will accelerate the leap from digitalization and networking to intelligence in all areas of the economy and society.

From the technical point of view, artificial intelligence is the product of the combination of hardware and software. Wang Haifeng, senior vice president of Baidu, said that the real artificial intelligence system involves voice, image, semantic, knowledge, underlying big data processing and so on, which is actually a comprehensive application of a variety of technologies. Inspired by the achievements of brain science research, brain-like intelligence is poised for development, and the trend of chip-based hardware platform is more obvious, which is also an important feature of the development of artificial intelligence into a new stage.

"Artificial intelligence must be integrated into the development of the industry before it can truly benefit." He Zhiqiang, president of Lenovo Venture Capital Group, believes that the combination and application of artificial intelligence with various fields will bring about the improvement of the benefits of the whole industry.

Each mobile phone screen has a piece of transparent protective glass, workers detect these glass vision loss is relatively large. An artificial intelligence technology company uses large laser instrument detection technology to generate data sets that rely on "machine learning" (a self-learning method of artificial intelligence) to make judgments, and uses machines to detect glass pieces, both efficiency and accuracy are greatly improved, and the comprehensive efficiency is increased by 20 times.

The accelerated accumulation of technical capabilities combined with massive data resources, huge application demands, and open market environment has formed a unique advantage in the development of artificial intelligence in China. According to statistics, as of last year, China has made important progress in the field of artificial intelligence, the number of relevant international scientific and technological papers published and the number of invention patents granted has ranked second in the world, and key core technologies in some fields have achieved important breakthroughs. Speech recognition and visual recognition technologies are leading the industry, Chinese information processing, intelligent monitoring, biometrics, industrial robots, service robots, and unmanned driving are gradually entering practical applications, artificial intelligence innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming increasingly active, and a number of leading backbone enterprises are accelerating growth, gaining widespread international attention and recognition.

Whether from the perspective of technological development or industrialization, the development of artificial intelligence is still at the primary level

However, whether from the perspective of technological development or industrialization, the development of artificial intelligence in China and even the world is still at the primary level.

Some experts believe that at present, artificial intelligence is somewhat deified, and it may exceed the ability of people in specific applications and specific scenarios, but it is still an unknown to fully reach or exceed human intelligence.

Almost all current AI systems are specialized AI systems, rather than general AI. Even the special artificial intelligence system that has achieved a huge breakthrough in speech recognition technology still has many problems that have not been solved. For example, if a group of people are chatting a few meters away, people will selectively only hear the voice of the person they pay attention to, and will naturally "block" other people's voices. But machines can't solve problems that seem so easy.

When it comes to the development prospects of artificial intelligence in China, academicians admit that foreign academics and business peers sincerely praise China's artificial intelligence application and business prospects in the forefront of the world, but they are not optimistic about whether the breakthrough of key technologies in the frontier of artificial intelligence such as the next basic algorithm of artificial intelligence will be in China.

In fact, the current domestic also has a clear understanding of this, the "new generation of artificial intelligence development plan" released in China last year pointed out that there is still a gap in the overall development level of artificial intelligence in China compared with developed countries, the lack of major original achievements, There is a big gap in basic theory, core algorithm and key equipment, high-end chips, major products and systems, basic materials, components, software and interfaces; Scientific research institutions and enterprises have not yet formed an ecosystem and industrial chain with international influence, and lack a systematic and advanced research and development layout; Ai cutting-edge talent is far from enough to meet the demand; The infrastructure, policies, regulations, and standard systems that adapt to the development of artificial intelligence need to be improved.

Some insiders said that at present, there is a certain impetuous phenomenon in the field of artificial intelligence entrepreneurship. Some young people take a three-month course in artificial intelligence and then dare to start a company. Objectively, there is a shortage of artificial intelligence talents, but this phenomenon of the proliferation of startups is also prone to forming a low-level development bubble, wasting human and social resources, and further leading to young people's reluctance to study technology.

"The New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan proposes to become the world's major artificial intelligence innovation center by 2030. To achieve this goal, the biggest shortcoming to be solved is the original innovation ability, including theoretical and method breakthroughs." Xu Bo, director of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that from a technical point of view, most of the domestic high-tech enterprises have not carried out basic research like foreign technology enterprises to build an ecological chain from basic research to chips and then to applications.

Pragmatism is the best way to develop artificial intelligence

According to the plan, the development of China's new generation of artificial intelligence will be divided into three steps by 2030. The first step, that is, by 2020, two years later, the overall technology and application of artificial intelligence will be synchronized with the world's advanced level, the competitiveness of the artificial intelligence industry will enter the first international square, and the artificial intelligence industry will become a new important economic growth point. It is also necessary to cultivate a number of the world's leading artificial intelligence backbone enterprises, the scale of artificial intelligence core industry exceeds 150 billion yuan, and the scale of related industries exceeds 1 trillion yuan.

Experts believe that in the current stage of AI development, pragmatism is the best way. Artificial intelligence is a technology-intensive, capital-intensive, talent-intensive industry, and the Internet business model innovation, business model innovation is different, it needs to implement software and hardware solutions, really solve people's concerns.

The pragmatism of artificial intelligence is also reflected in the systematic innovation of the combination of scenarios. For example, unmanned vehicles, smart homes and other application scenarios, each has its own characteristics, each has specific problems and special data, and it is necessary to solve the problems in the scene steadily in order to finally make a good application.

Pragmatism is also reflected in the focus on key core technologies. Pu Muming said that in the frontier basic field of artificial intelligence, China must occupy a place, and strive to make breakthroughs in basic research such as algorithms and architectures. "I'm most interested in how we can effectively understand the brain's networks and drive new breakthroughs in fundamental core algorithms."

Zhou Zhihua, director of the Department of Computer Science and dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence at Nanjing University, said that convolutional neural networks in artificial intelligence are a big hit today, but in fact they began to be studied 20 or 30 years ago. When he studied machine learning more than 20 years ago, there were not many people in China who knew about machine learning at that time, and they often asked questions like "this machine is ready to pick cotton or is it ready to repair machine tools". "In terms of academic research, even if you do something that others think is far from reality, as long as you think it is valuable, you should stick to it, which is pragmatic."

For the training of artificial intelligence talents, Zhou Zhihua believes that for artificial intelligence technology and industry, talent is the most important, and how good intelligent "artificial" is, how good artificial intelligence is. The distance between artificial intelligence academia and industry is very short, and many innovations can be immediately applied from the laboratory, which leads to a very large demand for talents in the academic sector. Universities and scientific research institutions should consciously cultivate talents and provide talent reserve. However, it is not possible to rush ahead and simply change disciplines such as computers and automation into the brand of artificial intelligence.

Academician Tan Tienu, vice chairman of the Chinese Society for Artificial Intelligence, believes that in the development process of artificial intelligence, it is necessary to rationally analyze the development future, rationally think about development goals and development paths, so as to pragmatically promote and ensure the healthy and sustainable development of artificial intelligence.