On September 19th, Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, delivered a keynote speech at the 2024 Yunqi Conference, stating that in order to achieve true AGI, the next generation of models needs to have a larger, more universal, and more generalized knowledge system, as well as more complex and multi-level logical reasoning capabilities. The investment threshold for advanced model competition worldwide will reach billions or tens of billions of dollars.
Wu Yongming stated that in the past 22 months, the big model technology has rapidly iterated and its usability has greatly improved. It now has multimodal capabilities in text, speech, and vision, and can begin to complete complex instructions. Meanwhile, the cost of model inference has exponentially decreased, far exceeding Moore's Law.
Over the past year, the price of calling the Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba Cloud Bailian has decreased by 97%, and the cost of calling millions of tokens has dropped to as low as 50 cents. Wu Yongming stated that the cost of inference is the key issue in the explosion of applications, and Alibaba Cloud will strive to continue reducing the cost.
"We can't just look at the future from the perspective of mobile Internet." Wu Yongming said that in the past three decades, the essence of the Internet wave is connectivity. The Internet has connected people, information, commerce and factories. Through connectivity, the collaboration efficiency of the world has been improved, great value has been created, and people's lifestyle has been changed. But generative AI creates new value through the supply of productivity, thereby creating greater intrinsic value for the world and overall improving the productivity level of the entire world. This kind of value creation may be ten times or dozens of times of the value of mobile Internet connection. We believe that generative AI will gradually penetrate and take over the digital world. Most things in the physical world will have AI capabilities, forming the next generation of new products with AI capabilities, and connecting with the cloud AI driven digital world to generate synergies
He said that the automotive industry is undergoing such a transformation, and robots will be the next industry to usher in a huge change.
At the same time, AI computing is accelerating its evolution and becoming the dominant force in computing systems. We see that in the market for new computing power, over 50% of new demand is driven by AI, and AI computing power demand has already taken the mainstream position. This trend will continue to expand. In the past year, Alibaba Cloud has invested in building a large amount of AI computing power, but it still falls far short of meeting the strong demand from customers Wu Yongming stated that almost all the customers, developers, and CTOs that Alibaba Cloud has encountered today are using AI to refactor their products. A large amount of new demand is being driven by GPU computing power, and a large number of existing applications are also being rewritten with GPUs. AI computing is accelerating its penetration in industries such as automotive, biomedicine, industrial simulation, weather forecasting, education, enterprise software, mobile apps, and gaming.
Alibaba Cloud is investing in AI technology research and infrastructure construction with unprecedented intensity. Our single network cluster has expanded to the 100000 card level, and we are rebuilding advanced AI infrastructure for the future from chips, servers, networks, storage to heat dissipation, power supply, data centers, and other aspects, "said Wu Yongming.