Editor's note: Belunn Se is a senior industry observer based in Shenzhen, China. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

If you have gone to the cinema and watched the popular movie "The Wandering Earth II" recently, you might be impressed by the intelligent quantum computer MOSS. It has no cognitive limitations, eliminated the perceptual thinking consciousness and left with the rational algorithm only. Therefore it can make the most rational decision in the shortest time based on the given conditions. In fact, such strong AI like MOSS, which has self-iteration, self-awareness and can make decisions and take actions independently beyond the scope of the designed program, does not exist in reality for the time being.

Nevertheless, weaker AI, which replaces human processing in a specific field, has already been imperceptibly integrated into our daily life. At present, most of the global AI level is also at this stage. For example, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), an office software that relieves employees by automating repetitive human tasks, simulating human operations such as on the keyboard and mouse.

Furthermore, OpenAI released the language model ChatGPT (Chat Generic Pre-Trained Transformer) in November last year, making human-machine interaction much more humanized and intelligent. Compared with traditional search engines, which display simple results content according to searching keywords, ChatGPT can interact with people just like dialoguing, complete information retrieval, answer professional questions, and also answer follow-up questions. Thanks to its revolutionary user experience, ChatGPT obtained more than one million users just five days after its release, while the GPT-3 released by OpenAI took nearly two years to break through one million users.

Far from being a Chatbot only, ChatGPT can also realize article creation, code generating and other functions only by requesting. ChatGPT even has the capability to write code for example Python, debug code and generate comments for code just like a professional programmer. It also presented strong capacity in content continuation, literary creation, music creation etc. Since it is so powerful that New York City public schools have banned it from their networks and school devices, and professors are revoking syllabi to prevent students from using it to perform their homework tasks.

Artificial intelligence evolution: from 'discriminant model' to 'generative model'

AI models can be roughly divided into two types: discriminant/analytical AI and generative AI.

Decision-based AI learns the conditional probability distribution from the data, analyze, judge and predict based on the existing data etc. It is widely used in precise content push in e-commerce, short video like TikTok, as well as image recognition in the autonomous vehicle industry. Through image recognition, face recognition and voice cognition algorithms, it replaces the common analytical work done by human beings, and also introduces weather predictions, epidemic predictions and other models to achieve better decision-making results than by ordinary people.

Generative AI like ChatGPT learns the joint probability distribution in data, not simply analyzing existing data, but learning to sum up existing data, and then creating acting skills. Based on history, he creates imitative and stitched creation, which generates new content and can solve discrimination problems.

Generative AI will greatly improve productivity and restructure the business

OpenAI released ChatGPT only four months ago. But in the past four months, there have been many predictions that ChatGPT will trigger changes and will overturn existing search engine products and its business models.

On the one hand, it is reported that Microsoft is talking about investing $10 billion in OpenAI at a valuation of $29 billion, all of which target at the new artificial intelligence paradigm – generative model. Microsoft also planned to integrate ChatGPT into its search engine 'Bing' to increase its market share in the search engine sector. Meanwhile, planned to introduce ChatGPT function into Office software kit to generate some text and answer some questions.

Google quickly responded in the market, 'code red' was raised within two weeks after the launch of ChatGPT, and the two of the founders were recalled back again after three years. On February 7, Google released its experimental conversation AI service called 'Bard' to counter ChatGPT.

Q&A text generation that similar to search engine is one of the earliest successful application fields of Generative AI. It has been widely used in Chatbot, content continuation, news release writing, poetry and novel creation and other fields. Importantly, the content continuation and literary creation have even reached the professional level.

Creation capacity is the core of Generative AI, and its essence is to upgrade and create productivity. Generative AI can not only realize the analysis, judgment and decision-making functions of traditional AI, but realize the creative functions beyond traditional AI's ability by learning elements from data and then generating new and original content.

Generative AI has spurred creative work in the fields of marketing, design, architecture and content, and has begun to carry out preliminary applications in life science, medical treatment, manufacturing, material science, media, entertainment, automobile, aerospace, bringing huge productivity improvements in various fields. It is expected that the application in the text field and code field will get more mature in 2023, while the mature application in the image/video/3D/game field will require more time for development.

Generative model artificial intelligence in China is still in its early stage, mainly for the generation of content services.

Building up an independent and controllable comprehensive AI industrial chain not only at the application level but also covering fundamental hardware AI chips and software AI algorithms getting more and more crucial in order to keep the industry competitiveness and secure the data security worries.

Chinese companies are good at business model innovation. We have the largest e-commerce platform in the world, convenient mobile payment, group purchase and takeaway platform system, as well, but lack the fundamental research and invention mode.

AI might be a technology competition that we can't afford to lose. Thanks to our talent and entrepreneurship culture, as well as having large internal market advantages, intelligent Chinese entrepreneurs can make great efforts on studying the technology innovation driven commercialization. Just like Chinese science fiction movies, we might be slow beginers, but we will not be absent. We believe that there will be a place for us in the future sooner or later.

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