The First Year That Jack Ma Was Not at Yunqi Conference, I Missed Him
The 2019 Yunqi Conference ended yesterday. During these three days, Alibaba held a number of technical sharing and exchanges around the theme of "Digital Intelligence". Unlike the past, as the first Yunqi Conference after Jack Ma stepped down, more chips were added in terms of technology, and AI became the protagonist of the conference. What are the major announcements at this Yunqi Conference? In addition to technology, what else is worth seeing?
Ten years have passed since Yunqi was founded. Unknowingly, the once inconspicuous local website forum has become one of the most watched technology events in the technology circle.The growing Yunqi Conference continues to witness the development of technology.
At the 2017 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba officially announced the establishment of an industry-university research institute. "Dharma Institute"At the 2018 Yunqi Conference, Jack Ma led "new retail" to "new manufacturing". In his speech, he said that the manufacturing industry used to rely on electricity, but in the future it will rely on data. He also pointed outChips will be the core technology.At the same time, Alibaba also announced Flathead BrotherSemiconductor company founded.
Before we knew it, a year had passed. The 2019 Yunqi Conference launched the world’s highest-performance AI inference chip, the “Hanguang 800”, which swept the technology circle.
This year's Yunqi Conference was held in Hangzhou Yunqi Town from September 25 to 27. However, this time, Jack Ma was no longer in charge, because not long ago, "Feng Qingyang" passed the baton to "Xiaoyaozi" Zhang Yong.
This year's Yunqi Conference Digital IntelligenceThe three-day conference has two main forums, More than 110 performancesThe conference covers the following topics:Machine intelligence, 5G, cloud-native database, biometrics, chips, blockchain, autonomous driving, heterogeneous computingAnd many other fields.
The entire conference, from the theme forums to special exchanges in multiple fields, the implementation of multiple AI industries, and the display of black technology product experience, all indicate a signal that Alibaba has fully opened the era of "digital economy".
Conference highlights: AI, chips, open source
Zhang Yong, who took over the mantle of Alibaba, said in his speech at the main forum: Ten years ago, we were discussing the budding of cloud computing and big data. Five years ago, we entered the era of mobile Internet. Looking forward to the future, the whole society is entering a comprehensive era.The era of digital economy.
Zhang Yong's speech at the main forum was like the spirit of advocating martial arts. Alibaba has gathered a group of "martial arts heroes", conducted a number of research and polishing, and used technology to create an AI world.
So in the new economy and society driven and supported by digitalization, what blockbuster products has Alibaba unveiled this year? Let’s take stock.
Day 1: Hanguang 800, the most powerful AI chip
The AI chip that had been rumored before the conference was grandly released on the first day of the conference. Alibaba's Pingtou Ge lived up to expectations and named the ancient artifact Hanguang 800, ranking first in performance tests.
In the standard ResNet-50 test, the inference performance of Hanguang 800 reached 78563 IPS, which is higher than the best AI chip in the industry. 4 times. The energy efficiency ratio is 500 IPS/W, ranking second 3.3 times.
For example, in the business test of Hangzhou City Brain,The computing power of one Hanguang 800 is equivalent to that of 10 GPUs.
According to the introduction, the breakthrough in performance of Hanguang 800 is due to the collaborative innovation of software and hardware. The hardware level adopts self-developed chip architecture, and solves the chip performance bottleneck through inference acceleration and other technologies; the software integrates advanced algorithms, deeply optimizes the calculation and storage density for CNN and visual algorithms, and finally realizes the calculation of large network models on a single NPU.
With the launch of Hanguang 800, plus the previous Xuantie 910 and Wujian SoC platforms, Alibaba's Pingtou Ge solved the difficulties in chip development with the spirit of a chivalrous warrior.
Day 2: FeiTian AI platform debuts
At the main forum Fei Tian Intelligence on the second day of the conference, Alibaba announced its overall breakthrough in artificial intelligence, fully demonstrating its AI capabilities from infrastructure to platforms and applications. It also officially launched a machine learning platform:FeiTian AI platform.
The FeiTian AI platform began development in 2014 and is China's first commercial cloud-based machine learning platform, targeting enterprises or individual developers.
It supportsHundreds of billions of features and hundreds of billions of training samplesThe ultra-large-scale classical algorithm can reduce 35% Training cost and improvement in multiple scenarios 400% It also pioneered visual modeling on the public cloud, providing developers with the ultimate user experience.
With the release of the FeiTian AI platform, together with the FeiTian big data platform and the DAMO Academy, we have built an AI ecological closed loop of computing, data, and algorithms, adding a strong stroke to our own AI development.
The data also shows that Alibaba AI is called more than 1 trillion times,Global 1 billion peopleUse. Average to process images per day 1 billionZhang, process video 1.2 millionHours, voice processing 550,000Hours, natural language processing 500 billionSentences, visual intelligence daily calls exceed 160 billionSecond-rate.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud also announced cooperation with Facebook.Pytorch It will enter Alibaba Cloud.
Day 3: Fully embrace open source
In the third day's agenda, the key words are reflected inOpen source.Great GodJia YangqingHe officially took up the banner of Alibaba's open source and became the head of Alibaba's open source technology committee. Open source has also become a core part of Alibaba.Technology strategy.
The popularity of open source culture and the growth of the open source community have a huge impact on the development of science and technology. Alibaba, which has a lot of resources and technology, is deepening its efforts in open source culture.
According to the introduction, Alibaba will start from two aspects: first,In-depth contributions to existing projects, and secondly,The current independent projects will be gradually released to the open source community.
Regarding future open source plans, Jia Yangqing said that it is available 「3+1」To summarize, 3 refers to the cloud native environment, operating system platform, and front-end projects, and 1 refers to the highly completed tools.
After introducing Alibaba’s open source plan, we also released Developer Cloud, providing developers with a barrier-free cloud experience, the best hardware, and a cloud ecosystem.
Experience the fun of technology while showing off your skills
In addition to showing off its technology, this year's Yunqi Conference also perfectly integrated technology with life and entertainment, allowing us to see developers who are both good at coding and having fun, and the participants also got to experience the fun of black technology.
The venue has set up several technology experience areas, with various small games full of technology:Mirror mind reading, geek secret room,Black technologyPhysical trainingetc., and also establishedYunxi Music Festival, Programmers’ Tucao MeetingAnd other fun projects, even before the technology sharing is equipped withRock music performance.
The well-loved Geek Escape Room is tailor-made for geeks. It sets up game scenarios from four aspects: genes, environment, network IP, and consciousness world. It sets up a 20-40 minute escape game in which players can only solve puzzles and unlock levels through codes.
This year's Yunqi Conference also added "Programmers Tucao Conference",And invited programmersTalk show host Hu Lan.
His complaints, which only programmers can understand, caused cheers from the audience. For example: The relationship between product managers and programmers is like that between Tang Monk and Sun Wukong. The product manager knows nothing but has to go to the monastery to learn scriptures, but he cannot hurt the White Bone Demon...
besides,Vending robots,Dessert making robotThese novel things also attracted participants to stop and take pictures.
Back to the conference itself, Jack Ma proposed DT (Data Technoley) in 2015, and this year, Zhang Yong elevated it to DI (Data Intelligence).
Although Jack Ma has withdrawn from the Yunqi Conference this year,Hanguang, Feitian, Damo Secret Formation, Cangxin PavilionFrom the names of Alibaba and Alibaba’s actions in research and development, we can see that Jack Ma’s personality traits and personal style are still deeply imprinted in Alibaba’s corporate culture.