What is the biggest difference between humans and robots?

A new species begins to daydream and learn to think, and a new civilization sprouts.

One day, robots will begin to daydream and learn to think, and the civilization of robots will also sprout from this. When that day comes, Earthlings will also feel threatened.

Although there is still a long way to go before that day.

01

All efforts in the field of artificial intelligence are aimed at one day, robots can achieve higher intelligence.

In March of this year, a man-machine century battle brought artificial intelligence into the public eye, and AlphaGo achieved a 4-1 record against Lee Sedol.

Before the competition, the big men from the Go and Internet circles were not optimistic about AlphaGo, including Li Kaifu, CEO of Innovation Works, who believed that "the probability of machine winning is very high".

But six months later, Li Kaifu announced that artificial intelligence is the trend, and Innovation Works will increase investment in this field. According to Hei Jun's understanding, the total size of the three US dollar funds and two RMB funds managed by Innovation Works has exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars.

The current situation is that artificial intelligence has become the field with the best investment opportunities.

According to incomplete statistics from Hei Jun, the AI startups that have publicly raised funds include (but not entirely):

On October 24th, Malong Technology, which is committed to image recognition, announced a Series A financing of 62 million yuan. The investment institutions include Dachen Venture Capital and Yuanjing Venture Capital for additional investment, and also introduced five new venture capital firms: CITIC Securities, Jinglin Capital, Menmen Venture Capital, Keke Capital, and Red Chip Investment;

In late September, ROOBO announced that it had completed a $100 million Series A financing round jointly invested by iFlytek and others;

Horizon Robotics completed Series A and Series A+financing in April and July of this year, with unknown amounts. The investors include Shuanghu Investment, Qingyun Investment, Xiangfeng Investment, and DST;

Mobvoi, which uses voice recognition for intelligent search, has received three rounds of funding since 2012, with a total amount of $75 million. And the Series C financing completed in October last year, invested by Google, was about $50 million. At present, the company's investors include Sequoia Capital, ZhenFund, SIG Haina Asia, Yuanmei Optoelectronics, and GoerTek Acoustics;

Turing OS received investments of 50 million yuan in Series A and 100 million yuan in Series B in 2015.

An investor bluntly stated, "There are more investors in this field than entrepreneurs

We can see that the blower of capital has been turned on, but is artificial intelligence really ready?

Starting from 0, it has not yet surpassed 1.

In the eyes of Wang Qi, founder of Qizhen KEEN, artificial intelligence in China is still in its infancy. Although artificial intelligence has a history of 60 years and is still in the process of going from 0 to 1, Wang Qi also believes that once artificial intelligence breaks through the boundary of 1, it will present an immeasurable development trend for humanity.

There are not only small start-up companies but also large-scale giant companies involved in the field of artificial intelligence.

Recently, Tencent Vice President Yao Xing revealed in his "TEDx Caohejing" speech that Tencent has already established a separate laboratory for AI research, which is dedicated to researching "general artificial intelligence" and providing more convenient intelligent tools;

By comparison, Alibaba can be considered an earlier player in terms of layout. The public relations department of Alibaba Cloud told Hei Jun that there is a team called iDST within Alibaba Cloud, dedicated to the research and development of artificial intelligence related technologies. Zhou Jingren and Hua Xiansheng, who previously worked at Microsoft, recently joined the team. At present, the team has research and development teams in Seattle, Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Hangzhou in the United States;

And Baidu also announced in September this year that it will fully enter the field of artificial intelligence. Baidu hopes to return to the peak with the advantage of its search accumulation in the form of "artificial intelligence+all business".

However, artificial intelligence is still at the stage of vertical technology application.

Alibaba Cloud, which was one of the earliest players in the field of artificial intelligence, told Hei Jun that the most widely used product in the company is the ET product, including 105 courts in Zhejiang Province using Alibaba Cloud's artificial intelligence ET for court records; Guangzhou uses ET to direct traffic and optimize traffic lights; Hangzhou has built a city brain using ET technology; The film and television investment company (New Dingming) has appointed ET as the investment manager to conduct investment return analysis on the project; Alibaba Music uses ET to explore music dark horses; Geely Automobile is operated by ET.

ET is a comprehensive product based on Alibaba Cloud's computing capabilities, equipped with intelligent voice interaction, image/video recognition, traffic prediction, sentiment analysis, and other skills

Tencent, on the other hand, opened its image processing technology, Youtu, to the industry in September last year. Through two products, Youtu Face Recognition and Wanxiang Youtu, mobile developers can have more advanced image processing capabilities. Within Tencent, Youtu technology has been integrated with various business group products and applied to fields such as finance, security, and identity recognition; Tencent's voice recognition is applied to products such as WeChat.

Chen Yining, a senior engineer at Alibaba Cloud, believes that "there is not much gap in the knowledge base of AI related technologies in the market, so no one has a special advantage. ”He told Hei Jun that technologies such as speech recognition and image recognition are indispensable in AI research and development.

At present, commercially available household service robots include floor cleaning robots, catering service robots, and companion robots, which are essentially just one type of artificial intelligence.

However, there is still a gap compared to Google's AlphaGo. And the distance to true artificial intelligence AI is just the beginning.

In the words of Yao Xing, Vice President of Tencent, overall, AI is still in a very early stage. Although we have made some breakthroughs in certain "perception" intelligence, such as our facial recognition ability in computer vision and shorthand ability in speech recognition, which are close to or exceed the average level of human intelligence, these are still very narrow compared to a person's comprehensive intelligence.

The evolution of algorithms only stays at the design of deeper neural networks and more complex neural network connections, using such complex neural network learning and more sample features to better fit the "perception" of the human brain, such as natural language processing for "cognitive" intelligence. However, in the face of this language sequence problem, although our neural networks have evolved from early RNNs to LSTM, and now to Attention Models, machines are still unable to fully handle this complex computation.

02

Artificial intelligence is not just about selling a robot, nor is it a technological breakthrough in a certain category. What we usually refer to as artificial intelligence is a new technological science that studies and develops theories, methods, technologies, and application systems for simulating, extending, and expanding human intelligence.

Regarding this issue, Mao Daqing, Deputy Director of the China Science and Technology Communication Center, believes that if everyone stays at the level of making and selling small robots, it will be difficult for artificial intelligence to flourish.

In fact, in terms of speech recognition and graphic recognition, companies such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, and even vertical domain companies like Malong Technology and Go Ask already have very strong technologies.

Mao Daqing believes that artificial intelligence is a strategic matter for the country. The development of artificial intelligence requires a lot of investment, and the country needs to lay out and invest in the underlying technology. Relying solely on angels and venture capital is far from enough. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have all made significant investments in national infrastructure. For example, nuclear technology has penetrated into all aspects today. If it weren't for the national strategy of laying the underlying technology, it wouldn't be as solid as it is today.

At this level, more funding and policy support are needed.

In the view of Huang Dinglong, CEO of Malong Technology, now is precisely the stage of market launch and the best period for the development of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been implemented from the sky to the ground, from distant black technology to tangible things around us.

Huang believes that it is this commercialization force that has the potential to become the driving force behind the development of artificial intelligence.

03

Will there be a situation where robots replace humans after the awakening of robot consciousness?

Yes, it's not.

In the technology industry, those who are concerned about the potential for artificial intelligence to take over the entire world are known as AI pessimists, including Iron Man Elon Elon Musk and Sam, President of Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator Altman.

They are all worried that if artificial intelligence continues to develop, this technology will take over the entire world in the future. Therefore, these two entrepreneurs invested over a billion dollars to jointly create OpenAI, a non-profit company aimed at maximizing the power of artificial intelligence and sharing the results with everyone who wants to apply this technology.

However, some in the scientific community believe that there are many things that can destroy the Earth, such as deadly biological viruses and nuclear weapons, and that current development cannot be stopped just because of concerns about the future.

Even if there is a Skynet (movie Terminator), it is still early, and scientists will still strive to promote the development of artificial intelligence. Chen Yining believes that there is no need to overly worry about the future.

Our scientists play the role of God. When creating robots with artificial intelligence, Hei Jun couldn't help but wonder, who is the God who created humans? Could he also be a scientific prophet?

As we have no idea, how long has this Earth existed and how long will it continue to exist? Will robots replace humans? If the law of natural selection was established by the "God" who created humanity, then humans, machine humans, and even other living beings may be more intelligent and evolved more thoroughly than humans.

Hei Jun believes that no living organism can permanently rule this earth, just as dinosaurs were the rulers of this earth a long, long time ago. The ultimate ruler of the Earth is the highest body on Earth. Hei Jun believes that that day will eventually come.