When Li Kaifu’s innovation workshop invested in Face++ four years ago, “Face Recognition†was only used as a black technology in the laboratory. "Artificial Intelligence" is also a stranger than the popular mobile Internet field of O2O and games.
At that time, Google did not acquire DeepMind. Microsoft, which could not find a new direction, just forced Ballmer; Baidu made the biggest acquisition in the history of the company in order to compete for mobile traffic portal, and Tencent is preparing to challenge Alipay through WeChat payment. . These Internet giants have not yet become advocates of artificial intelligence as they are today.
Four years later, Kai-Fu Lee did not need to use artificial intelligence to communicate with others. There are dozens of forums on artificial intelligence in the year, unmanned vehicles, robots, sensors, and frequent visitors to these Hollywood sci-fi movies suddenly become talks around. More people want to get a more direct answer from his mouth: how to make money from it?
For Kai-Fu Lee, the changes brought about by artificial intelligence are more clearly visible. He told us that his investment has been handed over to the machine for the past two years, and no financial manager is required to provide him with investment advice. The vast amount of capital market news he read was also written by machines rather than professional journalists.
"The past technological revolutions are helping people reduce costs and improve efficiency, but artificial intelligence is part of replacing people's work, on the other hand, it is to increase people's ability and release people to do other things." Li Kaifu said, "So I think It is the biggest vent of mankind in history."
Four years ago, investing in contempt technology helped Li Kaifu and the innovation workshop to enter this new field.
“Now what companies are relying on AI.†Kai-fu Lee said that because of this “wind-sweep effectâ€, he and the team were more cautious in selecting projects. In the short term, they value the commercial application of artificial intelligence technology in some vertical fields, and also invest in some more “magnificent†and “representative future†areas, such as driverless.
Artificial intelligence + traditional industry has great imagination
AlphaGo detonated a new round of discussion on artificial intelligence, but Kai-fu Lee believes that artificial intelligence has become a "window" in China, and everyone has seen the value created by some AI companies.
Kai-fu Lee
Li Kaifu’s investment in Vision Technology, which was invested four years ago, has become one of the best-returning projects in the innovation workshop in recent years. It just announced the completion of the $100 million Series C financing two weeks ago and became a unicorn company.
“Only face recognition has three very successful and profitable companies in Face++, Shang Tang and Yitu. What is face recognition? It is a small point in object recognition. What is object recognition? It is just a computer. A small point of vision. What is computer vision? It’s just a small tie in the whole artificial intelligence,†Li Kaifu said.
In the past few years, innovative workshops have invested in more than 25 start-up companies in the field of artificial intelligence. Interestingly, a large proportion of these companies are targeting traditional companies in the vertical sector that were often overlooked, such as banks, real estate, insurance, and automobiles.
Traditional companies have a large amount of historical data that provides natural convenience for the use of artificial intelligence. After analyzing the artificial intelligence technology, these data can get insights that are difficult to find in the business process: where the cost is wasted, and which business can be strengthened.
These things were originally done by companies hired consulting companies, and now they have another new option.
More and more investors and entrepreneurs like Kai-Fu Lee believe that serving traditional companies can create tremendous business value.
“The fourth paradigm we invest in helps banks earn tens of millions and hundreds of millions more. Do they not pay for this? Collect medical big data in the medical field, based on everyone’s genetic testing, he can do this for everyone. Kind of precision medicine, these things will help the future," Li Kaifu said.
In the past, the "secrets" of these data were in the hands of Internet giants such as BAT. Taobao analyzes your shopping habits to push you interested products. Tencent uses the accumulation of game operation data for many years to know what kind of promotion should be launched at what time, and stimulate you to continue playing.
Kai-fu Lee believes that technology giants will become an important force in the era of artificial intelligence, but he does not think that large companies can take all the food.
"Because artificial intelligence is not an extension of the past pie, it is completely new. In these areas, BAT, even Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple have no innate advantages, so cooperation with traditional companies, car companies, banking companies Cooperation, startups have many opportunities."
Reduce the threshold of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence technology can create great commercial value, but it is like a "Quake", which is difficult for ordinary entrepreneurs to pick up easily.
"Before writing an app, two children wrote it in the dormitory. This is zero startup cost. But now if you want artificial intelligence, even if you buy a new computer for training, it is $190,000." Kai-fu Lee In the "Declassification of Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneurship" forum held by the Beijing News in September this year, he said.
"The threshold for entrepreneurial intelligence is higher." Li Kaifu said. In that forum, he first revealed to the outside world the new action of innovative workshops in the field of artificial intelligence: the establishment of an artificial intelligence engineering institute to reduce the threshold of entrepreneurship in the field of artificial intelligence.
The engineering institute hopes to attract two types of people: artificial intelligence scientists and young computer geeks.
"The former category is already knowing how to do machine learning. There may be hundreds of people in China. There may be thousands of foreign Google and Facebook. This kind of talent is not easy to find. So we can find them and come over and do it. Project leader." Kai-fu Lee said.
For example, Wang Qigang, the deputy dean of the AI ​​Technology and Engineering Institute, has been doing it for more than 10 years at Google and was robbed by Li Kaifu from his old club.
The technical threshold of artificial intelligence itself makes this part of the talent extremely scarce. Google spent $400 million to acquire DeepMind in 2014. The most important reason is that these talents must be caught in their own hands.
Another special feature of this technology is that even if you don't have a relevant background, you can get started quickly in a short time. "It learns very fast, just graduated from the computer master, you can create value in artificial intelligence (domain) in six months, know how to use it." Kai-fu Lee said.
He believes that "a few experts with dozens of children", plus a large amount of data from investment institutions and cooperative companies, can make something new. "Computational resources, data resources, cooperative resources of traditional enterprises, business minds, experienced computer scientists, and a group of smart children, put them together to see if they can hatch a few valuable, then hatch A company like Face++ came out."
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