At the opening ceremony of the 2024 Yunqi Conference today, Wu Yongming, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, delivered a speech, sharing profound insights into the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
He revealed that over the past year, the price of Tongyi Qianwen API calls on Alibaba Cloud's BaiLian platform has dropped by 97%, with the cost for a million tokens now starting at just 0.5 yuan, and Alibaba Cloud will continue to strive to reduce costs.
Wu Yongming emphasized that despite the unprecedented speed of AI development, we are still in the early stages of the transformation towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). He pointed out that AI technology is rapidly evolving, with significant improvements in technical availability, and large models now possess multimodal capabilities in text, voice, and vision, capable of executing complex instructions. He illustrated this by noting that the mathematical capabilities of large models have advanced from a middle school level to an international Olympiad gold medal level, and are approaching a doctoral level in multiple fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology. At the same time, the cost of model inference is decreasing exponentially, a rate of progress that has far exceeded Moore's Law.
Wu Yongming also proposed that we cannot view the future solely through the lens of the mobile internet era. He believes that the potential of generative AI extends far beyond creating one or two super applications on mobile screens, but rather lies in taking over the digital world and subsequently transforming the physical world.
He reflected on the essence of the internet wave over the past 30 years, which has been to enhance social collaboration efficiency and create enormous value by connecting people, information, commercial services, and factories, thereby changing lifestyles. In contrast, generative AI creates new value through the supply of productivity, bringing greater intrinsic value to the world, namely the overall improvement of global productivity levels.
Wu Yongming展望 that the potential for generative AI to create value could be ten to several dozen times that of the mobile internet in terms of connecting and creating value. He believes that deep-level AI will gradually permeate and take over the digital world, ushering in a new era.
