Kai-Fu Lee: Sensors will be more important than AI chips

Latest update time：2018-04-26

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Source: Content from Sina Finance, thank you.

Recently, the fourth phase of Sinovation Ventures' US dollar venture capital fund was finally closed at US$500 million. Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, revealed that the fundraising took only one month and exceeded the original fundraising plan of US$300 million. At the Sinovation Ventures media communication meeting, Kai-Fu Lee expressed his continued optimism about China's development. Sinovation Ventures will focus on early and mid-term investment opportunities in China, and the investment areas will mainly focus on A and B round companies in the five major directions of artificial intelligence, education, consumption upgrades, B2B enterprise services, and cultural entertainment. In the future, C and D rounds will continue to increase.

Previously, Innovation Works was an “investment + incubation” model, but now Kai-Fu Lee emphasizes that the new positioning of Innovation Works is: a “VC + AI” institution.

Kai-Fu Lee believes that China will be the biggest beneficiary after artificial intelligence enters its explosive growth period. There are four waves of artificial intelligence applications. The first wave is Internet intelligence, which is like what BAT has done; the second wave is business intelligence, such as helping banks, insurance companies, and beverage companies convert existing data into commercial value; the third wave is physical world intelligence, such as identity authentication, smart speaker interaction, unmanned stores, and security; and the fourth wave is fully automatic intelligence.

"Today, China and the United States may be evenly matched in terms of Internet intelligence, but with the future restrictions imposed by the European Union on the United States, coupled with China's data advantages and segmented markets, I think China will have some advantages over the United States," said Kai-Fu Lee.

When talking about the AI chip industry, Kai-Fu Lee said that every wave of chips is an industrial revolution. For example, Intel made the best chips in the PC era. But in the mobile era, it did not solve the problem of power very well. So it was surpassed by ARM and others. Intel was not that powerful anymore. But now in the AI era, NVIDIA has come out again.

In Kai-Fu Lee's view, more AI may not just be processed in servers like NVIDIA. Many AI chips will enter terminals, such as mobile phones, driverless cars, and robots, which will bring greater opportunities and benefits.

Kai-Fu Lee is very optimistic about chip technology, but he admits that the United States is indeed leading. Therefore, when Sinovation Ventures looks at chip technology, it will look at Chinese projects as well as American projects. On average, it looks at slightly more American projects. "Because many American universities have accumulated years of pure optics, silicon photonics and other technologies, which are now booming, IOT will finally explode one day."

Regarding AI chip startups, Innovation Works also invests in a group of people, Kai-Fu Lee revealed, namely "Chinese students of top American professors who return to China to start businesses."

Compared with AI chips, Kai-Fu Lee believes that sensors will be very important, because the data transmitted by our sensors can be used to do the third and fourth waves of AI. Each type of sensor has different new practices, including some research in different disciplines that were very unpopular in the past, but are now suddenly found to be usable, such as in optics and other fields.

"Therefore, we believe that this should be a particularly good period for chip explosion. It can be said that there are four waves of artificial intelligence applications + chips," Kai-Fu Lee added.

As for the application of sensors, Kai-Fu Lee told Sina Technology that it depends on market stimulation. For example, Apple should be the fastest to stimulate the market. The structured light function in iPhone X should have prompted various companies to develop sensors in this area.

In addition, Kai-Fu Lee believes that in terms of sensor applications, the largest industry should be driverless cars. There are various sensors in driverless cars, and of course lidar is the largest one.

In the future, sensors will be applied to more fields, not just mobile phones and cars. Kai-Fu Lee gave an example to Sina Technology, saying, "Sensors can be used in smart manufacturing, robots, security, and even in future cameras."

It is worth noting that Sinovation Ventures has invested in the chip company OURS (Optical Universal RISC Systems), which is a "startup company with low-power edge computing AI chips as its core technology" - it has a full-stack solution from 3D sensors, specific field AI chips to software. OURS was founded by the group of people that Kai-Fu Lee called "Chinese students of top American professors". OURS founder and CEO Tan Zhangxi is the Chinese disciple of David Patterson, the new Turing Award winner in 2017.

In addition, Innovation Engineering has also invested in Horizon Robotics, whose founder and CEO Yu Kai once led Baidu's Deep Learning Institute. Horizon's BPU (Brain Processing Unit) chip is an efficient artificial intelligence processor architecture IP designed and developed independently, supporting ARM/GPU/FPGA/ASIC implementation, and focusing on specialized fields such as autonomous driving and facial image recognition.

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