Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu: The Greatest Imagination of AI Is to Change the Physical World

Sep 19, 2024, 20:09pm2024/09/19 20:10:11 Pandaily

At the opening ceremony of the 2024 APSARA Conference held on September 19, Eddie Wu, Director and CEO of Alibaba Group Holding Limited<img decoding="async" class="trade-card__loading" layout="fixed" height="50" width="50" src="https://assets.pandaily.com/uploads/2021/12/loading.png" placeholder />, and Chairman and CEO of Alibaba<img decoding="async" class="trade-card__loading" layout="fixed" height="50" width="50" src="https://assets.pandaily.com/uploads/2021/12/loading.png" placeholder /> Cloud Intelligence Group, stated, ‘In the newly added computing power market and computing power demand, more than 50% of the demand is now driven by AI. The demand for AI computing power has penetrated over 50%, dominating the market, and this trend will continue to expand in the future.’

‘AI computing is rapidly evolving and becoming dominant in the entire computing ecosystem, whether in edge computing or cloud computing; this is a very obvious trend. The reconstruction of the digital world and the physical world by generative AI will lead to fundamental changes in computing architecture,” Eddie Wu stated. “The computing system dominated by CPUs over the past few decades is accelerating towards an AI computing system led by GPUs. In the future, almost all software and hardware will possess inference capabilities, and their computing kernels will shift to a model dominated by GPU AI computation, with CPU computation serving as a support.’

‘In industries such as automotive, biomedicine, industrial simulation, weather forecasting, educational enterprise software, mobile applications, and gaming, AI computing is accelerating its penetration. An unseen emerging industrial revolution is quietly evolving in every sector, and all industries require more powerful, larger-scale computing infrastructure that is better suited to the demands of AI,’ Eddie Wu remarked.

Eddie Wu stated, ‘Alibaba<img decoding="async" class="trade-card__loading" layout="fixed" height="50" width="50" src="https://assets.pandaily.com/uploads/2021/12/loading.png" placeholder /> Cloud is investing in AI technology research and the construction of infrastructure with unprecedented intensity. Our single network cluster expansion has reached a scale of 100,000 cards, and we are rebuilding advanced AI infrastructure for the future from various aspects including chips, servers, network storage, and power supply data centers.’

Eddie Wu also mentioned, ‘Over the past year, the calling price of the Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba<img decoding="async" class="trade-card__loading" layout="fixed" height="50" width="50" src="https://assets.pandaily.com/uploads/2021/12/loading.png" placeholder /> Cloud’s Bailian has decreased by 97%. The cost for one million tokens has dropped to as low as 0.5 yuan, and Alibaba<img decoding="async" class="trade-card__loading" layout="fixed" height="50" width="50" src="https://assets.pandaily.com/uploads/2021/12/loading.png" placeholder /> Cloud will continue to work hard to reduce costs further.’ Last year, the mathematical capability of the large model was only at the level of a middle school student, but today it has reached the level of an international Olympiad gold medalist, making advances in multiple areas such as physics, chemistry, and biology, approaching the level of a PhD student. Meanwhile, the inference cost of the model has decreased exponentially, far exceeding Moore’s Law.

Eddie Wu believes that the greatest imagination of AI does not lie in mobile screens, but in changing the physical world. ‘In the past 22 months, the speed of AI development has surpassed any historical period, but it is still in the early stages of AGI transformation. The greatest imagination of generative AI is not about creating one or two new super apps on mobile screens but about taking over the digital world and changing the physical world.’

Subscribe now to get unlimited access.