Meituan Vice President Xia Huaxia: Technology should serve every ordinary person and be a "down-to-earth AI" | MEET2021

The editorial department compiled from the MEET 2021
Quantum Bit Report | Public Account QbitAI

At the end of 2020, it has become a consensus that AI technology has penetrated into all aspects of life and has become a general trend of technological change.

However, what kind of technological applications can enable cutting-edge technology to truly create value for society and better serve people?

At the MEET 2021 Smart Future Conference, Dr. Xia Huaxia, Vice President and Chief Scientist of Meituan, said:

Any technology is objective, and the people who use the technology are the subjects who embody its values.

Xia Huaxia pointed out that down-to-earth AI is a major trend in the development of artificial intelligence. AI, which was driven by numbers and capital in the past, has become AI driven by actual value after gradually landing today.

Who determines this value? Naturally, it is the beneficiaries of technology, the general public .

In order to fully reflect Xia Huaxia's thoughts on how to implement artificial intelligence, Quantum位 edited and sorted out the content of his speech without changing the original meaning. I hope it can also bring you new inspiration.

About MEET Smart Future Conference: MEET Conference is a top business summit in the field of smart technology hosted by QuantumBit, dedicated to exploring the implementation and industry application of cutting-edge technologies. More than 20 top industry experts including Kai-Fu Lee shared their views at the conference, more than 500 industry audiences participated, and more than 1.5 million netizens watched the live broadcast online. Dozens of mainstream media including Xinhua News Agency, Sohu Technology, The Paper, and Cover News reported on the event, with a total online exposure of more than 20 million.

This time, Dr. Xia Huaxia was also selected into the Quantum位“2020 Top 30 Chinese Artificial Intelligence Business Leaders” list.

Key Points

• The value of science and technology workers is to use technology to help every ordinary person live a better life.

• AI, which was driven by numbers and capital in the past, has become AI driven by actual value, and the value is determined by every ordinary person.

• Technological development should not leave anyone behind.

• The practical application of technology does not conflict with long-term and challenging scientific and technological exploration.

• In the future, artificial intelligence should become the basic infrastructure of life like water, electricity, and gas. It is everywhere, but it does not necessarily need to be perceived by users. AI can serve us in every corner of life.

(The following is the full text of Xia Huaxia’s speech)

What is “down-to-earth AI”?

How can AI really serve everyone? I gave it a clear theme, called "down-to-earth AI".

Let’s start with three short stories.

The first story is that when Meituan’s engineers were communicating with some blind friends, they found that in the Internet age, many blind people still have many difficulties when ordering and eating.

Because they cannot use the applications on their mobile phones freely, they can only order food from a fixed restaurant and a fixed dish.

After the engineers learned about this situation, they used intelligent voice technology to develop a function for the visually impaired to order food intelligently using voice.

The second story is about the restaurant operator.

We know that during the peak ordering period every day, restaurants are very busy. At this time, if users want to communicate with restaurant owners through the communication system in the App about some minor issues, such as changing a dish, modifying the address or refunding, they often cannot receive a reply from the merchant and can only call.

This is very inefficient for both users and merchants.

To this end, Meituan’s engineers used natural language processing technology to create a very simple function: helping restaurant operators respond to users’ questions and assuming the responsibilities of intelligent customer service.

When users ask questions in the system, the AI ​​assistant will collaborate with humans to help merchants respond quickly, improving restaurant customer service efficiency while greatly improving the user experience.

Many restaurant operators have given feedback on this feature, saying "This feature is so easy to use" and "Finally, we see something useful for us."

The third story is about Meituan’s driverless car.

During this year's epidemic, Meituan used unmanned delivery vehicles to cooperate with riders to deliver takeout to residents of more than 10 nearby communities in Shunyi District, Beijing, avoiding human contact as much as possible.

In fact, Meituan has been researching and developing unmanned delivery for nearly four years. When the epidemic broke out, Meituan's unmanned delivery team worked urgently and put unmanned vehicles into use 11 months ahead of schedule.

In fact, whether it is helping users order food more conveniently, being a customer service robot, or having driverless cars deliver lunch boxes, they are essentially small things.

However, I think this precisely reflects the value of the work of many scientific and technological workers——

Use technology to help every ordinary person live a better life .

"Down-to-earth AI" is a major trend in the development of artificial intelligence. In the past, AI was driven by numbers and capital, but now it has gradually been implemented and driven by actual value.

Who determines this value? Naturally, it is the beneficiaries of technology, the general public.

Why does Meituan want to develop “down-to-earth AI”?

Let’s talk about it from three levels.

First, the landing speed is down to earth

Meituan has a large number of "down-to-earth" scenario demands that need to be responded to quickly through technological research and development.

Taking the very difficult year of 2020 as an example, according to incomplete statistics, Meituan’s AI team solved nearly 3,000 problems in actual scenarios during this year, covering all aspects of delivery scheduling strategy adjustments and merchant intelligent operations.

This speed of research and development is very down-to-earth.

Secondly, the service industry is down-to-earth

Meituan is now involved in more than 200 different industries, covering all aspects of food, clothing, housing, transportation, eating, drinking and entertainment.

For Meituan, one of the purposes of doing AI is to apply AI technology to ordinary local life services and help each small store operate better.

From the user's perspective, artificial intelligence has penetrated into every aspect of daily life, bringing about an improvement in user experience and making many things that seemed "impossible" in the past "possible."

From the perspective of merchants, the AI ​​capabilities provided by platforms like Meituan can help merchants upgrade to informatization, digitalization, intelligence and even automation, and optimize their overall business methods.

For example, Meituan has accumulated nearly 8 billion user reviews on its platform, which are very important "treasures" for merchants. By analyzing them with AI algorithms, merchants can know many details: what changes have occurred in user experience recently, whether there are any problems with the recent service, hygiene, and environment, etc., so as to constantly review their own business services.

In this process, Meituan has developed the Meituan Business Brain , which realizes the value of big data through natural language processing and knowledge graph technology and provides it to merchants on the platform.

What can a “business brain” do?

This "brain" contains analysis of more than 7.7 billion user evaluation data and hundreds of billions of knowledge associations. Merchants can see changes in users' emotional curves towards specific stores, users' consumption levels, environmental preferences, recommended dishes, similar merchants and other information.

Finally, the service objects are down-to-earth

Meituan always hopes to help everyone eat better and live better. So we are not serving a small group of people, but every ordinary person.

Nowadays, technology is developing rapidly, but we sometimes see that technology and the Internet seem to have left some people behind, and not everyone enjoys the convenience brought by technology.

We don’t want this to happen. The technical purpose of Meituan AI is that the development of technology should not leave anyone behind.

Let’s go back to the story at the beginning of the speech about helping the blind man order takeout.