Consumerism is in full swing, and the Internet no longer has technological innovation

 In the past year, companies scrambled for IPOs, and some "bleeded" continuously and plunged all the way, and some IPOs were high light, which was enviable.

On November 20, Yixian E-commerce , the parent company of Perfect Diary , was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. On the first day of trading, its share price rose 75.24% to US$18.40, with a market value of US$12.2 billion; on December 11, Bubble Mart officially It was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with an issue price of HK$38.5 and an opening price of HK$77.1, which was a 100.26% increase from the issue price, and its market value exceeded HK$100 billion.

Perfect Diary and Bubble Mart broke out among a group of listed companies, attracting the attention of the outside world to new consumer brands. It is worth mentioning that in the tea industry, hi tea, vitality forest, tea Yan Yue Se and other websites Red brands have emerged one after another, driving wave after wave of consumer enthusiasm. In the game industry, the emergence of explosive models also quickly brought young companies such as Mihayou and Lilith to the center of the stage, damaging the face of major game companies. The interweaving and changes of the old and new forces will be particularly conspicuous in 2020.

In fact, this is also a reflection of the rise of a new generation of entrepreneurs, such as Perfect Diary, Bubble Mart, Hi Tea, Miha Tour... behind this are mostly the post-80s.

Post-80s entrepreneurs have become the core force of the current entrepreneurial world.

But not all post-80s entrepreneurs are so lucky. Technology-based startups represented by the "AI Four Little Dragons" all announced their impact on the listing this year, and it is still unclear who will get this AI "first share". In the context of doubts about the entire industry, the valuation given to them by the market is also unsatisfactory.

Flowers and applause on one side, cold water and doubts on the other.

Two Roads for Post-80s Entrepreneurs

In the early years, when the post-70s founders began to call the wind and rain and buy emerging companies everywhere, the post-80s entrepreneurs struggled to survive in the fierce competition between the giants, and when they were acquired as the reality, the post-90s had already begun to enter the entrepreneurial stage. Disturb the situation on the tuyere. As a result, the Internet entrepreneurs in the post-80s group once showed a "disruption" phenomenon, which also makes the post-80s entrepreneurs' sense of existence seem not as good as the post-90s.

Now this situation is changing. Zhang Yiming, Su Hua, Huang Zheng and other post-80s tycoons have already gained a foothold in front of the giants. In addition, a large number of post-80s entrepreneurs have gathered in front of the IPO this year. . They can be roughly divided into two distinct camps: technology companies emerging from the AI ​​entrepreneurial wave and new consumer brands born from consumerism.

The former takes the technical route and the latter takes the marketing route.

In 2016, AlphaGo defeated the world's top Go player Li Shishi with an overwhelming 4:1 advantage. This victory quickly blew up a massive artificial intelligence trend in China, and countless entrepreneurs devoted themselves to the AI ​​boom. Earlier, a large number of technical elites who had been dormant in the laboratory for many years also chose to walk out of the laboratory. They were looking for outlets, betting on them, and eager to change the world with technology.

The post-80s accounted for a large part, such as Yin Qi, who was born in 1988, graduated from Tsinghua University with a master's degree in computer science from Columbia University, and co-founded Megvii Technology with two classmates , and Lou Tiancheng, born in 1986— The recognized first person in computer programming for college students in China founded Xiaoma Zhixing.

In addition, the AI ​​"Four Little Dragons" and the Cambrian that just went public, these AI start-ups that have broken out of the siege, are behind the 80s entrepreneurs.

However, the upsurge of AI entrepreneurship did not continue after all. In 2020, entrepreneurs will target the new needs of young consumer groups and play new tricks in industries such as tea and entertainment . Different from the past entrepreneurs, the new batch of post-80s are good at stimulating consumer desires, creating products in a way that satisfies the curiosity of users, and shaping new “net celebrities” one after another.

The entrepreneurial wave represented by new consumer brands such as Perfect Diary and Bubble Mart is no longer a deep transformation of business models or the creation of new species based on technological breakthroughs, but the market's pursuit of them has surpassed AI companies. After being listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, Cambrian’s stock price fluctuated all the way. The current market value is only 64.8 billion yuan, while Bubble Mart’s listing broke through 100 billion Hong Kong dollars; the AI ​​"Four Little Dragons" went public on a bumpy road, and the perfect diary only took 4 years. Time has become the first stock of Chinese beauty.

The high expectations of the outside world for AI have fallen, and the business prospects of AI companies have been questioned. The road of technological entrepreneurship seems to have entered a cold winter, and consumerism is prevailing, trendy shoes, blind boxes, beauty... can meet the inner needs of young consumers The products are popular, attracting more entrepreneurs influx.

However, this trend hides the crisis.

2020, no new story in venture capital

In September of this year, Ali publicly predicted that "the next ten years are the 10 years for the Internet to create new brands." They believe that the rise of "new consumer brands" will become the most certain opportunity for China in the next 5-10 years.

Jiang Fan’s original intention is to emphasize that Tmall is still the core position of the new brand. From the perspective of the entire entrepreneurial environment, this judgment is surprisingly similar to the current entrepreneurial track focused on creating consumer brands. Perfect Diary, Bubble Mart , Hey Tea, Yuanqi Forest, Tea Yanyue... There seems to be no other new business stories besides those pouring into the center of the entrepreneurial stage in 2020.

Internet giants are busy reducing dimensionality and cracking down on vegetable vendors, and a new generation of entrepreneurs is staring at the pockets of young people.

This is inevitable. The Internet has left fewer and fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs born in the 1980s. Each track and each subdivision has almost been crowded with all-pervasive giants or entrepreneurs within the giant system, which does not include those who have fallen out. "Floating corpses" everywhere. If you take a closer look at the top 100 apps in Yuehuo, you will find that there are almost no new products born in 2020. Only when consumerism prevails, new brands can grow rapidly.

However, mainstream public opinion criticizes consumerism, and many people believe that consumerism deceives the younger generation to consume the symbolic meaning of goods rather than the actual use value. For example, blind boxes. Buying a blind box does not necessarily mean you really like the contents, but the act of opening the box itself brings an emotional experience similar to gambling.

The outside world is worried that young consumers will fall into the trap of consumerism, but it may be the entrepreneurial model that actually enters the trap.

From 2010 to 2020, there have been many climaxes in the wave of Internet entrepreneurship. Takeaway, O2O, online ride-hailing, short video, sharing economy, AI... these outlets are becoming more and more lively with more and more capital participation, but they are carried. The value of innovation has plummeted. From transforming traditional industries, upgrading consumption patterns to killing users' time, until now, only the satisfaction of consumer desires remains.

This is related to the starting point of the entrepreneurs. In the past, the original intention of entrepreneurs was to change, but now it has become catering. This leads to a key problem. Consumers’ consumer needs and psychology are constantly changing. Once you are not sure about this change, The life cycle of the company's products will be greatly reduced.

Moreover, the original commercial chain from user habit formation to user value mining is no longer established.

Another risk is that behind the new consumer brands such as Bubble Mart, Hey Tea, and Genki Forest are essentially consumer behaviors promoted by the insecurities of the current young people. When more and more people realize that this consumption behavior does not have much benefit in anxiety relief, it is obvious what choice they will make.

No more "breakers" on the Internet

Will the next BAT emerge among Internet startups in 2015?

This question was once asked by a netizen on Zhihu in September 2015. Among the few answers, the answer was surprisingly consistent: No.

However, the facts later hit the face. On January 6, even though it was caught in a storm of public opinion, Pinduoduo's stock price skyrocketed, and its market value reached its highest value ever-230 billion US dollars. Huang Zheng personal wealth also suffered over the horse of Ma Teng and become China's second richest. For entrepreneurs, Pinduoduo's success is more impactful than Meituan, which is not much different from its market value.

New forces such as Meituan and Didi have grown into industry giants, relying on model innovation to transform traditional industries. This is no different from the earlier BAT occupying the e-commerce, social, and search fields without strong opponents. Pinduoduo It was abruptly breaking through the cracks between Ali and JD.com. This seems to prove that the entrepreneurs who have fallen behind have proved that in an industry environment with a set pattern, it is not necessarily impossible to beat the big with small ones.

However, if you want to ask if there will be the next "Pinduoduo" among Internet startups in 2021, the answer may still be pessimistic.

According to statistics from it oranges , there will be a total of 3886 new economy companies in China in 2020, with a total financing of 814.5 billion yuan. And in this big cake, 56% of the funds were taken by companies with a financing amount of more than 1 billion yuan, but such companies only accounted for 4% of the invested companies, and 89% of the companies had only Won 1 vote.

It is clear that future funding set the trend in the head a few companies will be more severe.

More specifically, where did most of this money go? On the one hand, medical care, online education, industrial Internet, and technology sectors represented by robots, chips, and smart hardware; on the other hand, new consumption investment in second-tier cities, that is, new consumption of tea, self-heating pot , hot and sour powder, etc. Brand.

In the former entrepreneurial track that has been in development for several years, in theory, technology companies have the greatest potential and are far more imaginative than Pinduoduo. However, technology-based companies have the characteristics of long R&D time and long commercial payback period. In the mid- and early stages, R&D is the main focus, with products as a supplement, and the business model is relatively backward. This has become the biggest flaw in the capital winter, because the market pays more attention to the profitability of the company itself.

Therefore, the way such companies could have been financing through venture capital is no longer possible, and they can only rely on the stock market to meet their growing capital needs.

As for the latter, new consumer brands such as Bubble Mart, Hi Tea, and Vitality Forest are also marketing success and failure marketing. Under the restriction of non-rigid demand, its products can cover only a small group of young people. Those who like it are willing to consume, and those who don't like it are hard to impress. What's more, there are many subdivisions in the new consumer field, and it will be difficult to give birth to a giant that unifies the tea or play market.

New entrepreneurs born in the 1980s still have a long way to go.

In 2020, the "lipstick effect" will begin to appear. Consumers avoid buying bulk commodities and prefer products that can satisfy strong consumer desires and bring psychological comfort. This is true for lipsticks, blind boxes, and online tea drinks, which will give birth to There are more new consumer brands. However, whether this is a good era or a bad era is uncertain.

But the pockets of consumers have long been targeted by countless entrepreneurs. Their methods have no technical content, but you still haven't seen the key.

AI voice unicorn Yunzhisheng hit the sci-tech innovation board, and its core-making power and market planning power attracted attention

 Not long ago, Yunzhisheng formally submitted the IPO prospectus materials to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and entered the inquiry stage smoothly.

In the summer of 2012, in the domestic speech recognition circle, the news of Huang Wei "going away" to start a business spread like wildfire. As a technically capable person in the field of speech recognition, Huang Wei previously served as a senior researcher at Motorola for a long time, helping the company launch the world's first voiceprint recognition mobile phone; later, he served as a core executive of the Shanda Innovation Institute, and established a reputation for a while The voice branch.

Gao Guang's resume, Huang Wei's "where" undoubtedly aroused the attention of the industry. It didn't take long for a speech recognition company named "Yunzhisheng" to be formally registered.

In Huang Wei's own words, even though he has made a lot of achievements in the field of voice, when Yunzhisheng was just established, the company's specific direction was not completely determined, but it only saw the rapid development of mobile devices. However, what he never doubted is that in the future smart devices, "sound" will definitely become a very important way of interaction, which is promising in various business scenarios.

Slogans like "18 months is the time window" and "6 months is the line of life and death for startups" are not unfamiliar to the slightly "impetuous" technology startup circle. In contrast, there are very few companies that truly rely on innovative technologies and continue to invest in various business application scenarios. At the moment, Yun Zhisheng has quietly passed his eighth birthday and has become an important player in the AI ​​voice segmentation industry.

Starting from the voice recognition track, to providing a complete intelligent voice solution, accompanied by the start of core manufacturing, the "cloud-end-core" product strategy...In the past eight years, Yunzhisheng’s technical, engineering and industrial capabilities have Continue to mature. Yunzhisheng has grown into an AI voice company with "full stack" capabilities. At this time, it may be the right time for Yun Zhisheng to exert his strength to the next target and sprint into the capital market.

Not long ago, Yunzhisheng formally submitted the IPO prospectus materials to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and entered the inquiry stage smoothly. In this regard, the industry has heatedly said that "the first AI voice on the Sci-tech Innovation Board" may be born soon. Under the public's expectations, where is Yunzhisheng's hard power in technology? How high is the commercial moat of the enterprise? With the blessing of capital, what changes will Yunzhisheng's future development have?

Eight years of AI voice accumulation from unicorn to impact on science and technology innovation board

In the 1980s, the American futurist Alvin Toffler’s scientific and technological masterpiece "The Third Wave" was officially published. The book boldly predicted the digital age with computers and digital technology as the core driving force, and set off the scientific and technological circles Optimistic expectations of the "information society".

Passion is put into practice, and the future has arrived. After 2010, the digital economy has grown rapidly, and the world has officially entered the mobile Internet era. Among them, the new infrastructure revolution represented by 5G and artificial intelligence has become the most important source of power in the digital economy.

It is worth noting that during this period, not only were there a wide variety of networked devices, but also the networking scenes continued to produce new breakthroughs. Users can access the network through common hardware such as mobile phones and computers, and all kinds of home appliances, home appliances, and even medical and automotive hardware can be transformed into network interfaces to enrich the business scenarios of networking.

In this context, AI vision and voice tracks were born and gradually became an important part of the domestic artificial intelligence market. Compared with images, the voice interaction process and interaction logic are more complex, which also determines the complexity and difficulty of commercial application of its products, and users have higher expectations for product performance. On the other hand, the image also has a more fixed scene application than the voice track. Therefore, the commercial realization of the image field is more stable.

There is a voice on the market saying that for voice companies, survival means more testing the team's ability to "market planning". At this level, Yunzhisheng's technological accumulation and commercial application path may be worthy of reference by the industry.

In terms of intelligent voice interaction products, Yunzhisheng can currently provide cross-hardware platforms, cross-application scenarios, and cloud-core integrated IoT voice interaction products. At the same time, it can also face industry-level customers, covering "perception", "cognition", "Decisions" and other different levels of intelligent voice tool products. In the field of smart IoT solutions, the company mainly provides integrated smart IoT solutions for specific scenarios such as hotels, communities, residences, and hospitals, helping many enterprise-level customers to achieve interconnection between users and devices, and between devices and devices. interactive.

Regarding the development logic of Yunzhisheng in the AI ​​voice track, Huang Wei concluded, “Because we are at the forefront of the industry, not in the research room, we know what our customers need better. If this technology is to meet the needs of scenarios, What must we do."

Two minority choices to upgrade business liquidity

After the precise positioning of the track, the sustainable realization of the company also requires strong innovation capabilities. In this regard, Yun Zhisheng's two technical choices must be mentioned. Among them, the first introduction of DNN in 2012 can be regarded as Yun Zhisheng's first "minority" attempt.

The so-called DNN refers to the "deep neural network algorithm", which can successfully increase the previous speech recognition rate significantly. It has been a popular topic in the field of machine learning in the industry and academia in recent years. However, the verification of model correctness is complicated and requires more time and money to test, which is also the main feature of DNN.

For Yun Zhisheng, who had just entered the initial stage of entrepreneurship, the cost of trial and error for the enterprise can be imagined. But at this moment, Huang Wei still made the decision to enable DNN. In his view, with the increase in computing power and the expansion of the sample database, DNN is the most effective way to improve AI "IQ", and higher costs also mean higher and faster returns.

In the later commercial practice, Yun Zhisheng's technical prediction was also proved to be correct and efficient. After choosing DNN, the speech recognition accuracy rate of Yunzhisheng products has been greatly improved, and soon reached the standard for commercial use. From the current choices of most companies, DNN has also become a mainstream choice.

The second minority choice of Yunzhisheng is reflected in its layout of artificial intelligence voice chips. But compared to choosing the DNN algorithm, Yunzhisheng's "core-making" road has experienced greater doubts.

Since all core artificial intelligence technologies are computationally intensive, they have a rigid demand for hardware computing power. While providing sufficient computing power, the edge-side chips of the Internet of Things also need to consider functions, power consumption, cost, Many factors such as reliability. Therefore, without the ability to provide sufficient computing power from the end-side and the relatively cheap underlying hardware support, it will be difficult for the company to have the best cloud-side intelligent solutions, and there is no way to talk about rich commercial returns.

As Huang Wei said, "Not making a chip is a dead end." This is not a question of good or better, but a question of "to be or not to be". If you think this thing must be done, then just do it.

Despite the controversy, it seems that this time the core-making decision has become an important reason why Yunzhisheng is different from other AI voice companies and shapes the technological moat.

Public information shows that since 2015, Yunzhisheng has started to deploy artificial intelligence voice chips and began to develop uDSP processors and DeepNet IP technology. On this basis, it was the first to deliver artificial intelligence voice chips-"Swift" in 2018. In 2019, we will successively launch the car-grade chip "Snow Leopard" and the second upgraded version of the chip "Hummingbird" series for the home furnishing field, and start the research and development of the chip "Dolphin" with "image + voice" multi-modal interaction function, continuing to lead Same industry...

According to the prospectus disclosed by Yunzhisheng, the company's operating income in 2018 has increased by three times compared with 2017, and its main sources are reflected in the chip and hardware fields. And if it does not personally get involved in chip manufacturing, Yunzhisheng may not be able to empower the industry on a large scale and at low cost, and it will not be able to truly step into the small circle of technology and enter the large circle of industry.

Summarizing the company’s development past, if we want to characterize every “minority choice” of Yunzhisheng, perhaps it is — always stand from the perspective of practical problem solving, stand on the height of user experience, stand on the actual solution to user needs Direction.

Multiple business application scenarios, expecting capital to be empowered

With the blessing of its own chips, Yunzhisheng has rapidly strengthened its ability to commercialize the technology. In specific commercial applications, the company has successfully developed two series of intelligent voice interactive products and intelligent IoT solutions, and has gained widespread recognition in the home and medical fields.

In residential and hotel scenarios, Yunzhisheng uses air-conditioning voice modules as a breakthrough, and through in-depth cooperation with leading home appliance companies such as Gree, it has expanded and formed an IoT voice interaction product series covering dozens of IoT devices. , The company further upgraded its single product to a comprehensive solution, and delivered it to hotels, communities and other scenarios.

In addition, it has also established a joint venture with Shimao Group to deliver smart IoT solutions in batches to many hotels under Shimao Group, bringing rapid growth in sales revenue to the company.

In the hospital scenario, in 2016, Yunzhisheng cooperated with Peking Union Medical College Hospital to take the lead in implementing medical record transfer solutions in China, and it was quickly promoted in the industry. It has been used in more than 100 hospitals and more than 500 Home hospitals are used in testing. In addition, Yunzhisheng has also built a large-scale medical knowledge map based on the needs of smart medical care, and launched medical record quality control systems, smart follow-up products based on this, and built and improved medical smart IoT solutions to expand its influence in the hospital scene .

Focusing on the fundraising project of Yunzhisheng preparing for the Science and Technology Innovation Board this time, it once again reflects the company's continuous and in-depth development goals for technical capabilities, engineering capabilities, and industrial capabilities.

According to the prospectus, Yunzhisheng intends to issue no more than 20.25 million shares and plans to raise about 912 million yuan for use in artificial intelligence technology mid-stage construction projects, artificial intelligence chip research and development platform construction projects for edge computing of the Internet of things, and artificial intelligence Technical smart hospital solution construction project and supplementary working capital.

In addition to the capital blessing, the favorable policies seem to foretell Yunzhisheng's future development opportunities. In the "Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Term Goals for 2035" recently released, expressions such as "Science and Technology Self-reliance as a Strategic Support for National Development" have once again triggered the industry Hot discussion. In addition, the "recommendation" also pointed out that it is necessary to target frontier fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, and brain science, and implement a batch of forward-looking and strategic national major scientific and technological projects.

Some insiders commented that technology, engineering, and industry are compounded, which together constitute Yunzhisheng's AI full-stack capabilities. It is not difficult to imagine that if it successfully enters the capital market, Yunzhisheng will continue to maintain its technology and application leadership, further consolidate its core competitiveness, and promote the further development of the domestic AI voice track.

Help the machine install eyes, "Dingna Automation" completed the B round of 100 million yuan financing

 Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions.

Machine vision is an important front branch of the artificial intelligence industry. Machine vision gives machines the ability to "see" and "cognize" by simulating the human visual system, which is the basis for machines to understand the world.

The global machine vision market has been growing steadily since 2015 and is expected to reach US$25 billion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 22.1%. China's machine vision market has entered a stage of rapid development since 2015 , with a compound growth rate of 24.9% from 2015 to 2022, which is higher than the global level.

Suzhou Dingna Automation is a company that can provide machine vision inspection solutions for manufacturing customers . Recently, Dingna completed a 100 million yuan B round of financing jointly invested by Source Code Capital, Yuanhai Minghua, and Xiaomiao Capital . The Series B financing will be used to expand production capacity, meet customer needs, introduce high-end experts and talents, develop new products, and maintain the competitiveness of technologies and products.

Dingna was established in 2010. The company is committed to 3D vision ultra-high-precision measurement technology, deep learning complex defect detection technology, artificial intelligence object recognition technology and robot vision intelligent grasping technology, and launches a comprehensive software and hardware integration Automatic intelligent manufacturing equipment currently covers subdivision scenarios such as 3C, automobiles, 5G, display panels, and semiconductors.

"So far, Dingna has 10 years of experience in the industry. The past 10 years can be divided into three stages. From 2010 to 2017, we are mainly doing machine vision system modules , and we have been exposed to nearly a thousand application scenarios ; from 2017 -In 2019, we made an overall solution based on visual inspection; in 2020, some of our projects will begin mass production, and most of our target customers are from the 3C industry.” said Dingna CEO Qin Yinghua.

Qin Yinghua recalled that the cooperation between Dingna and US consumer electronics giants began in 2013, but initially focused on "indirect cooperation". " We provide vision systems to third-party equipment integrators, and then they provide them to each other as a whole." Since 2017, Dingna has become a direct partner of each other.

"We are facing the quality system of the other side's entire parts supply chain, such as glass, metal parts, plastic parts, etc. We have to conduct quality inspections for the production links of these parts." Qin Yinghua said.

Qin Yinghua compared Dingna's attempts in the 3C field in the first few years to "from 1 to 99", but now it is "from 99 to 99.99". "The step from 99 to 99.99 looks relatively small, but it is the most difficult step. Because 1-99 is mainly iterative, there may be no way to achieve mass landing, and a small number of machines need to be put into the customer’s production line. Verify whether the technology is stable and reliable." Qin Yinghua said. "But the last step from 99 to 99.99 means that a large number of equipment will be launched for mass production."

Qin Yinghua said that the entire process needs to systematically optimize and iterate on equipment hardware and software algorithms. What customers need is a stable and reliable equipment that has been repeatedly tempered, not a single industrial camera or a piece of the latest algorithm code.

In the first 7 years of the company's establishment, Dingna completed the accumulation from 1 to 99. "We have done many projects in non-3C industries and have accumulated rich experience in many industries. However, it is not easy to gain the trust of customers at the top of the pyramid . It took Dingna a full 3 years. From our indirect service to the customer, Established contact with them and upgraded to a "direct partner", one is because the technology has been recognized by the other party, and the other is because we insist on being customer-centric and can quickly respond to the other party's requirements and meet customer needs."

"The other party was worried that our company's volume was too small and the risk was not easy to control, so initially we only cooperated on small projects, such as visual inspection related to smart watch parts." Qin Yinghua said that Dingna successfully completed the task. Gaining the trust of each other, while the company expanded in a planned way, the ability to undertake projects was stronger, and the two parties gradually began to dock tasks related to smartphone parts.

Qin Yinghua said that in the past two years, the American technology giant has consciously cultivated its domestic supply chain. At the same time, as a whole, the market size of machine vision inspection equipment in the field of consumer electronics and related display panels, chip manufacturing and other core components will be close to 3 billion yuan in 2019, and will reach nearly 4 billion in 2020. Consumer electronic products have a short life cycle and a large demand, so in the next few years it will drive the rapid growth of machine vision market demand.

According to Qin Yinghua's plan, Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions, and the long-term goal is to establish a firm foothold in the consumer electronics field and penetrate into display panels, automobiles and other fields in the future. Currently, Dingna has self-developed standardized modules and productizable solutions in the process of serving customers across industries.

In terms of team, Dingna has a professional team of 300 people, mainly technical R&D personnel. Dingna Automation invests 15% of its revenue in research and development every year. The company already has more than 80 patents and software copyrights. At present, the company has branches in Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Silicon Valley in the United States, and is accelerating the layout of its R&D headquarters in Suzhou Park.

Artificial intelligence can only "optimize", while humans can "evolve"

 

Consciousness is the function of the human brain

Editor's note: Artificial intelligence is booming under the feed of massive amounts of data, but is it truly intelligent? The author of this article Douglas Rushkoff believes that artificial intelligence is not. Although artificial intelligence is superior to the human brain in computing and other aspects, artificial intelligence is still unable to compare with the neurons of the human brain. How the human brain generates awareness is still a mystery and needs to be solved by later scientists. The original title The Difference Between Optimizing and Evolving.

Image credit: Paul Burns / Getty Issues

Artificial intelligence is not life.

Because they will not evolve. Although artificial intelligence may iterate and optimize, but that is not evolution. Evolution is random mutation in a specific environment. In contrast, machine learning is aimed at a specific, pre-programmed purpose. It may be complicated, but not as complicated as evolution, weather, ocean, or nature. Complex systems, such as traffic lights that can be seen everywhere in cities, can direct the actions of people and cars. In contrast, complex systems, such as transportation circles, can spontaneously form flows through the interaction of many participants. The machine has many complicated parts and processes, but there is no higher order; the complexity of life is born out of them.

No matter how many names people give to new functions of computers that sound like neurological terms, computers are not aware. Some people are keen to imagine what computers will look like in the future. They like to use terms such as "fuzzy logic", believing that these programming techniques can make computers operate closer to human thinking. Fuzzy logic means that computer programs can handle values ​​other than 1 or 0 and can represent them as 1 or 0. This is the whole meaning of fuzzy logic. It can be seen that in the face of real uncertainty, fuzzy logic is not fuzzy at all. It just reduces the roughness and complexity of the real world to binary that can be processed by the computer.

Likewise, neural networks are not like the human brain. A neural network has layers of nodes, and its way of learning new knowledge is to analyze hundreds of cases input from the outside world. Instead of describing what a cat looks like to the computer, we feed it hundreds of pictures of "cats" until it can determine the common and distinguishable features of "cats" in these pictures. However, humans can generalize the category of "cats" only by seeing a photo of a cat. How does the human brain do it? We are not so sure.

We cannot say exactly what it means to be a thoughtful, conscious human being, but this should not be considered a shortcoming of the human brain. Human thinking is not computer-based, and reality itself is only information. The human brain has intelligence, which is a unique ability of the brain; there are a lot of data in reality, but if there is no human consciousness to reflect them, then the human brain and these data are meaningless. We cannot downgrade human consciousness to primitive processing power. For example, the human body can certainly lift weights, but we can never lift heavy objects as lightly as a crane. Similarly, our calculation speed cannot be compared with supercomputers. But the value of human beings is far more diverse than mere "usefulness". Using technological intervention or directly replacing the human brain with technology to strengthen an index that is conducive to employment will only forget other potentially more important values, the most important of which is consciousness itself.

Science has shown that consciousness is a completely incalculable quantum state in the tiniest structure of the brain-microtubules. In the human brain, there are billions of these microtubules, and each microtubule has many active points. If all the computer chips in the world are integrated into a computer, this computer will also be in the human brain. Defeated in front of the complex.

Only computer developers will act as if consciousness is simple enough to be replicated by machines. Real neuroscientists are still confused about the impossibility of self-awareness in a bunch of neurons. This conclusion contradicts reality.

This does not mean that we will quickly deny the existence of consciousness. Consciousness is not an illusion of human brain caused by DNA in order for people to have survival instincts. We do not live in a virtual world. Our consciousness is real. With the development of physics up to now, even physicists have admitted that the reason for the existence of consciousness is more sufficient than the existence of objective reality: quantum theory believes that it may not exist before we observe objective reality. In other words, the universe is a bunch of possibilities, until someone's consciousness approaches it and sees it in a certain way, then it can condense into what we call reality.

Searching for the origin of consciousness is a bit like searching for the smallest cosmic particles. It is more like a doctrine from the perspective of mechanistic science, rather than a true reflection of how the brain works. Whenever we find a final determinant, such as a gene, we will later discover that it is determined by something else. Once we discover a certain pathogenic bacteria, we will grasp its characteristics, discover the most suitable environment for its growth, and even discover the mechanism that causes it to cause disease. The only way to solve the problem of the origin of consciousness is through first-hand experience. In addition, when researching, we should maintain respect for the world in which we live and the other people who share the whole world with us.

In this sense, we know the existence of consciousness because we know how it feels. There is a cup of coffee on the kitchen table, we can see it, animals or computers can also see it, but humans are different, humans also know what it feels like to see a cup of coffee on the table. Choosing to look at that cup and noticing it is the uniqueness of human consciousness. Computers can’t do this. They can only see everything within the camera’s range. They don’t “pay attention”, they don’t have the focus of their sight. Know the real direction.

To understand what it feels like to look at a cup of coffee, you need to construct your mind and self. Currently, only humans can do this, because humans are humans and computers are just objects.

Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Human Team". Image source: Internet

This article is section 58 of Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Human Team".