Yike's "Taibai" was born and penetrated the human Go camp at a lightning speed. However, even if it is 1V5, even if it is a top human chess player, many people are concerned about Yike's grandiose claim that AI has surpassed the field of Go.
Human wisdom is still dissatisfied.
There are many reasonable reasons for this. For example, the AI appeared too suddenly, and no one had time to carefully study its chess moves; for example, the time was too recent, and the chess players were not fully adjusted to the best state...
However, it is too late to feel sorry for the human chess players. Now it is "Alpha" from Google who has rushed to the battlefield.
Following AI's unparalleled victory over humans, Yike quickly determined the time for technical discussions with Google, directly setting it for July 3, and still started live broadcasting throughout the process.
Fang Zhuo doesn't understand Go, but he is very interested in the verification and exchange of this technology.
This time it was not just a game between two AIs, Yike also held a deep learning exchange event with Google in Shanghai. NVIDIA and Silicon Valley's recent R&D personnel and startups in this field also participated.
Yike is really willing to learn from each other, and Google and Silicon Valley don't have much intention to compete, because the tossing on this track does not see much hope of breakthrough, and it is still in the stage of accumulating strength.
It is precisely because of this situation that many uninvited developers and companies saw the interaction between the two companies and actively signed up to participate in the event. After discussing with Google, Yike simply expanded the scale and postponed the time to
July 10th.
This is not an AI interaction in a Go game, but a deep learning DL seminar using it as an appetizer.
On July 10, Yike, Google, Nvidia and other companies held a meeting at the Yike Center in Shanghai. At the same time, Yike also invited previously defeated Ke Jie, Li Shishi, Shen Zhenzhen and others as guests to witness "Taibai".
"The showdown with "Alpha".
Both AIs have a history of beating top human chess players. Taibai's multi-faceted fights and public hype last month also successfully made the public interested in AI. In addition, there were live broadcasts, so there were many viewers.
At nine o'clock in the morning, two robots sat in the center of the stage, and a large screen was set up on the spot. Fang Zhuo, Larry and others sat in the front row, while chess players Ke Jie, Shen Zhenzhen and other guests commented in the live broadcast room.
Different from the 1V5 that was also broadcast live last time, "Taibai" and "Alpha" both moved very quickly, and occasionally hesitated, but such moments were extremely short compared to humans.
The game was played according to traditional rules, and each player had three hours. However, in just thirty-two minutes, this much-anticipated game ended with "Taibai" winning one piece.
These thirty-two minutes are thirty-two minutes that most people cannot understand. However, they can see the performance of the chess players, and they can see that there were disagreements in the live broadcast room at the beginning, arguments in the middle, and finally silence.
the process of.
When Ke Jie was invited to the stage to comment on the game as a professional, he faced the camera at a loss. After a while, he said: "AI may have completely surpassed human imagination in Go. Last month I
It seems that I see the shadows of Gu Li, Lee Chang-ho, and Wu Qingyuan in AI's chess, and I also seem to see my own shadow."
Ke Jie's expression showed struggle and pain, and she stretched out her hands to cover her face: "Today, I can't see, I can't see at all. I don't seem to understand, I don't understand what Go is like..."
Seeing that Ke Jie had lost his composure, the host quickly asked this top human chess player to step down and smooth things over, but this scene undoubtedly left a deep impression on those who watched the live broadcast.
The appetizer of the AI chess game was over, and Fang Zhuo got the microphone and gave a brief speech.
"Go is a masterpiece of human intelligence, but so is AI."
"My expectation for AI is that it can greatly liberate human hands. This day may be far away, but today's 'Taibai' has made progress compared to last month."
"AI will evolve at an amazing iterative speed. We are gathered here today to find the right direction of development."
"AI has defeated humans in the field of Go, but this is not the end of human wisdom, but an extension of human wisdom. It is another advancement in technology and another exploration of the future."
Fang Zhuo's expression of this view still won a lot of applause and praise in the live broadcast room.
For many people, the excitement is just here, but for practitioners and developers, the real part has just begun. Both Yike and Google have conducted in-depth research in the field of deep learning DL.
This kind of Go game is just the surface, the inner operation and thinking are what people pay more attention to.
As one of the leaders of Yike's "Venus" project, Andrew Ng communicated with Silva from Google's subsidiary company about DL's model logic.
Regardless of Taibai or Alpha, they are all based on the development of convolutional neural networks. This foundation is similar, and its breakthrough originated from the paper on the AlexNet deep convolutional neural network jointly published by Alex, Ilya and Hinton in 2012.
, and it was precisely after this that related research experienced explosive growth.
What Ng Enda and Silva talked about was the architectural innovation after AlexNet, which is the effective integration of traditional search algorithms and deep learning models, and the entire team’s efforts in local receptive fields, parameter sharing and sparse connections, and translational invariance.
effort.
This kind of communication between Yike, Google and the guests was extremely pleasant, and it also made Fang Zhuo quite satisfied. Although he didn't understand, looking at such a scene, he felt that knowledge was stuffed into his brain.
However, the next day, when Andrew Ng brought up the team's confusion in research and development, a heated debate ensued.
Yike has voice assistants like "Siri" as a practice for artificial intelligence, and Andrew Ng's team is not only doing research on convolutional neural networks (CNN), but also on recurrent neural networks (RNN). They believe that the latter is more suitable for use with voice.
The assistants are combined, but the effect is not very good and the desired results cannot be achieved at all.
where is the problem?
Ng Enda expressed his confusion and also talked about the solution direction within Yike.
Some people attending the meeting agreed with Yike's problem-solving ideas, but there were different voices from Google.
"Why do we have to use recurrent neural networks?" Google's Uskert was originally on vacation, but he signed up because he was interested in DL exchanges. "Why not try Self-attention? I think it is very useful for NLP.
There will be better changes in the field.”
"Self-attention can perform better parallel computing capabilities instead of sequential processing like RNN. It can also directly compare the vector representations of any two positions in the sequence, so that it can more effectively capture and utilize long-distance dependencies.
, but RNN can’t!”
“Although RNN can theoretically capture long-distance dependencies, in practice it is often difficult to achieve due to vanishing or exploding gradient problems!”
Uskert is studying Google's machine translation improvement methods. His father is a professor of computational linguistics. Although he disliked the work of language translation when he first joined Google, he eventually focused on research in this field.
, and what he is thinking about recently is the improvement of "Self-attention" in related fields.
Andrew Ng quickly understood what the Google researcher meant, and after some thought, he retorted: "Self-attention does not explicitly encode positional information, which means that if the model with it as its core cannot distinguish the same words in different sequences in different
The meaning of position is different, and in natural language processing, the semantics of words are closely related to position."
“Moreover, the self-attention model must have a huge number of parameters due to the attention weight calculated for each pair of elements in the sequence, which is very likely to lead to overfitting.”
As soon as he spoke, Silva from Google's own DL also refuted the new route proposed by Uskert. One of the important reasons is that the cyclic structure of RNN is too consistent with everyone's understanding of sequence data processing, that is, the current state depends on
Past information, and the global dependence of self-attention is not as intuitive as RNN at first glance.
The two leaders of Yiko and Google both criticized self-attention, but Uskert was not convinced and went directly to the stage to explain more of his ideas.
Moreover, some solutions are also given to address the shortcomings criticized by Ng Enda and Silva, such as introducing positional coding, for example, conducting research on multi-head attention.
Some people find it enlightening, some find it whimsical, and some people perform quick analysis and calculations on the spot.
Fang Zhuo, who was in the first row, was extremely confused. He turned around and asked Jensen Huang, the head of NVIDIA, who was thinking deeply next to him: "What are they discussing?"
"Uskert said that GPU is the most suitable hardware for deep learning technology." Huang Renxun gave a summary.
Fang Zhuo: "???"
He wondered: "Why haven't I heard similar expressions at all?"
"Because Self-Attention puts more emphasis on parallel processing, this is what GPUs are better at." Huang Renxun said with a smile, "As for the other things, it's not important. We just need to extract what is beneficial to us."
Fang Zhuo observed the atmosphere at the scene. This was no longer an exchange of knowledge, but more like a battle of knowledge.
He silently put away his little presence on such occasions.
However, in the evening, Fang Zhuo still asked Andrew Ng, who participated in the debate, face to face, wanting to know what was going on in this red-hot discussion.
It was really difficult for Ng Enda to explain to Mr. Fang what happened.
"Mr. Fang, let's think about it and write a report again." He said sincerely after thinking for a long time, "Maybe we should have more exchanges like this. His self-attention, I think about it now, is not a shortcoming.
It can’t be solved.”
Fang Zhuo asked patiently: "Then what should we do?"
Ng recalled today's entire debate, thinking about the different ideas put forward by different people, and murmured: "Maybe we need to try a new type of software first so that it can talk to the computer."
Fang Zhuo said "hmm" and expressed his consistent support: "Okay, let's get started."
Ng Enda didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and said sincerely: "Mr. Fang, the support you give us is really generous."
"I can only give what I can." Fang Zhuo said with a smile, "Let's give it a try. If there are not enough people, then we will recruit more people from home. I have a simple understanding. Since it can cause controversy,
There is merit in new things.”
Ng Enda gave a thumbs up and liked the support from his boss.
However, Yike's current situation is not so wonderful.
He raised a small concern in this regard.
Fang Zhuo said nonchalantly: "How much money do you guys invest? It just so happens that a batch of NVIDIA GPUs are about to arrive. Let's try them out first. I see Huang Renxun is smiling very happily today."
If Ng wasn't good at business matters, he would have gone shirtless to help Yike sell goods.
However, although he cannot sell goods, Yike's exchanges with Google and Silicon Valley companies have directly further stabilized the company's stock price.
Yike seems to have solid research and development. Although it is unclear when it will have commercial value, AI defeating humans in the field of Go is undoubtedly a real breakthrough.
Yike's stock price has fallen badly enough, isn't it enough now?
In response to this voice in the media, Russell of RC Hedge Fund was quite angry. He and a group of short sellers were also paying attention to Yike's recent exchanges with Google and other companies. However, they did not recognize the impact of this field on Yike's stock price.
promote.
Not only that, Russell also invited Conborn, a senior executive of the American manufacturer DuPont, to let professionals judge the current situation of Yike and Bingxin.
"The photoresist in the ice core must have been used up! This is determined by the material itself, and the ice core cannot violate the laws of reality!"
"China's photoresist is very backward, and it will be impossible to provide usable raw materials for ice cores for at least five years!"
Senior executives from DuPont swore in front of the camera to give their conclusions.
This kind of professional judgment in the monopoly field has indeed caused some people to cast doubt on the future of Yike and Ice Core. As time enters July, the market performance of Yike mobile phones seems to have verified the possibility of the discontinuation of the cutting-edge ice core technology.
However, Russell's private communication with Conborn was slightly shortened in terms of time limit.
"It can take as short as two years or as long as three years, and Ice Core will have usable photoresist." Kang Boen still swears by his judgment, "You can't overestimate the research and development of Yike and Ice Core, but you can't overestimate it either.
Too underestimated.”
He doubled his expectations on TV. That was a genuine exaggeration, but now he is also sincerely helping Russell analyze the situation.
"Two or three years is enough, completely enough." Russell was very satisfied with the stimulation such action brought to Yike's stock price. "This is enough to cause Yike to suffer an irreversible decline."
He commented on Yike: "Kang Boen, Yike has a shortcoming, do you know what it is?"
Cornborn listened to the short seller's advice: "What is it?"
Russell smiled and said: "Yike has only one shortcoming, it is not strong enough."
Kang Boen has reservations. There will be no company in the world that covers everything. Yike is already strong, but he also respects the short seller who is attacking Yike's stock.
Moreover, he also shared his exchange with this person on Twitter.
——Yike has only one shortcoming, it is not strong enough.
On July 19, Yike, which was not strong enough, released its Q2 financial report, stating to the market the current financial situation of the company and the changes during this period.
Throughout the second quarter, Yike's revenue dropped again from Q1, from US$29.344 billion to US$18.14 billion, a rate of 38.18%, while key data such as operating profit and net profit also experienced a more consistent decline.
Generally speaking, the second quarter is the off-season, and Yike's second quarter figures in previous years have been lower than those in the first quarter. However, leaving aside the normal effects, this 38.18% decline is still very ugly.
Although there are different opinions on Wall Street regarding Yike's Q2 financial report, they believe that "advertising revenue has increased significantly", "technology licensing fees have increased significantly" and "cloud business has grown unexpectedly", which together support Yike's transformation, but
, the market value of Yike, which has been stable at US$280 billion recently, has plummeted.
As of July 26, Yike’s market value fell to US$251.3 billion within a week.
Yike is known as the two poles of YA in China, and with its decline like this, it is very close to Alibaba's current market value of US$228.9 billion, and the difference between the two is only one and a half degrees.
RC Hedge Fund’s Russell immediately mocked Yike’s decline.
"Hahaha, after Mr. Fang has been working for these years, the company's market value is only as high as Alibaba's!"
"The concept is only temporary. AI has not made any substantial breakthrough. Its popularity will soon pass. Yike is returning to where it should be!"
"I have already said that Yike has no magic power anymore, and Mr. Fang has no magic power anymore!"
"He screwed everything up! Yike has been screwed by him!"
