As the new golden decade approaches, what opportunities and challenges will artificial intelligence face?

　　The National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference have concluded. "Artificial intelligence" is still a hot topic, but this year it has a different meaning. The Fourth Session of the 13th National People's Congress voted to pass the 14th Five-Year Plan, and the smart economy is expected to be a watershed year for the smart economy. 2021 is likely to be a watershed year for the smart economy.

　　2021, the watershed of smart economy

　　Since 2016, there have been more and more voices about artificial intelligence at the two sessions. At the 2017 two sessions, Baidu CEO Robin Li submitted three proposals related to AI, and iFlytek CEO and Chairman Liu Qingfeng proposed to elevate "Intelligence +" to a national strategy... "Artificial intelligence" is still a high-frequency word at this year's two sessions.

　　The five proposals submitted by Robin Li involved autonomous driving, smart transportation, and smart elderly care in communities, all of which were related to AI; Lenovo's Yang Yuanqing proposed the concept of "new IT", namely Intelligent Transformation; Xiaomi's Lei Jun's suggestions involved three aspects, including smart manufacturing; 360's Zhou Hongyi suggested strengthening the network security of smart cars as soon as possible...

　　In the 14th Five-Year Plan outline voted and approved at the two sessions, "science and technology" appeared 36 times, "digital" appeared 17 times, and "intelligence" appeared 7 times. "Accelerating digital development" and "developing strategic emerging industries" both have their own independent chapters.

　　The outline of the plan points out: "Develop the digital economy, promote digital industrialization and industrial digitization, promote the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy, and build a digital industry cluster with international competitiveness. Strengthen the construction of a digital society and digital government, and improve the digitalization and intelligence level of public services, social governance, etc."

　　The outline of the plan clearly states that it is necessary to "promote the deep integration of the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence and other industries, promote the development of advanced manufacturing clusters, build a number of strategic emerging industry growth engines with their own characteristics, complementary advantages and reasonable structures, and cultivate new technologies, new products, new formats and new models."

　　At this year's two sessions, representatives emphasized two words: "application", and paid more attention to the implementation of AI in the fields of industrial economy, social livelihood and urban governance. The Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan points out that we should vigorously develop the intelligent economy. 2021 is the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan, and it will also be a crucial year for China's artificial intelligence industry.

　　During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, my country's total R&D expenditure increased from 1.42 trillion yuan to 2.21 trillion yuan, focusing on strengthening basic research and key core technology research, and further enhancing its scientific and technological strength. Artificial intelligence is one of the key areas of independent innovation in my country's science and technology. my country's AI industry has achieved globally renowned achievements, and the foundations of talent, algorithms, and computing power have been improved.

　　The pandemic hit in 2020, and AI has contributed to epidemic prevention, and the whole society has reached a high degree of consensus on intelligence. During the pandemic, my country proposed the "new infrastructure" strategy, of which artificial intelligence is one of its important components. The local two sessions that have ended also show that many parts of the country are accelerating the construction of the digital economy, developing the artificial intelligence industry, and accelerating the intelligent upgrading of industries.

　　With the right time, place and people, artificial intelligence will move from small-scale applications to large-scale implementation in 2021.

　　In the new decade, what new opportunities does the smart economy face?

　　1. Further breakthroughs in basic AI technologies.

　　AI has experienced a "revolutionary decade" of great development, with deep learning as the core of the underlying algorithm. With the large-scale application of AI, bottlenecks have appeared in AI technology. Scientists and engineers have overcome bottlenecks within the existing technical framework, but it is difficult to eliminate them. At the algorithm level, artificial intelligence is currently in its early stages, and it still requires a comprehensive improvement in technology from passive perception to active perception, cognition and decision-making; at the computing power level, artificial intelligence places higher requirements on computing, and the current computing system is overwhelmed in terms of cost, performance and energy consumption.

　　In the new decade, the basic technology of AI may leap forward again. Jürgen Schmidhuber, the father of the recurrent neural network LSTM, wrote in 2020 that natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and reinforcement learning were the main technical lines of AI in the first decade. In the next decade, quantum computing, unsupervised learning, shallow learning networks, and computing power vs. deep learning progress are expected. If quantum computing can make breakthrough progress, AI will be a different picture: "Moore's Law has been irrefutable since it was proposed in 1975, but our development has slowed down in the past 10 years. Therefore, many people believe that technological progress is coming, and it may be the quantum computing we discussed earlier. This will help promote major advances in deep learning."

　　my country has strategically laid out the next generation of AI technology. The 14th Five-Year Plan outline points out that we should target cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, biological breeding, aerospace technology, deep earth and deep sea, and implement a number of forward-looking and strategic national major scientific and technological projects.

　　2. Smart cloud will become the “water, electricity and coal” of society.

　　More and more companies are aware of the value of AI, but the threshold for AI technology is quite high, and it is not realistic or necessary for companies to develop AI on their own. Based on the "cloud service" model, companies can quickly develop AI applications based on the AI ​​technology capabilities in the cloud.

　　At the end of 2020, an IDC report predicted that by 2021, at least 65% of China's top 1,000 companies will use AI tools such as natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning to enable 60% of use cases in business areas such as customer experience, security, operations management, and procurement. IDC pointed out in the "China Artificial Intelligence Cloud Service Market Research Report (2020H1)" report that enterprise intelligent transformation is an important factor driving the growth of the AI ​​Cloud market, and AI cloud service providers will gain an increasingly higher market share in the overall AI software and application market. The fact that cloud computing giants have added "intelligence" to their names reflects their increasing attention to AI cloud services.

　　In the first decade, cloud computing was the digital infrastructure of society; in the new decade, AI will become a major growth point in the cloud computing market, and smart cloud will become the water, electricity and coal of the smart society.

　　3. Service robots are entering a golden period of development.

　　In the past decade, there have been few large-scale AI applications. In the consumer market, a few products such as smart speakers, smart cars, and smart homes have achieved intelligence and are sold on a large scale; in the industry market, AI has gradually begun to be applied in a few industries such as epidemic prevention, education, finance, and logistics.

　　The AI ​​application that is expected to explode in the new decade is service robots. Service robots refer to various advanced robots used in non-manufacturing industries and serving humans, except for industrial robots, mainly including personal/household service robots and public service robots.

　　With the aging population and rising labor costs, the market demand for service robots is stronger. According to Strategy Analytics data, after an annual sales growth of 24% in 2020, service robot sales will accelerate by 31% in 2021. The Covid-19 epidemic in 2020 promoted the growth of service robots. They helped families clean floors, accompany children, help companies sort and deliver goods, and disinfect the environment with ultraviolet light. During the epidemic, the anti-epidemic robots of UBTECH, a star service robot company, were used in 16 countries and regions; nearly 6,000 hotels under Huazhu have implemented contactless smart services, and hotel robots deliver more than 200,000 times a month, becoming a beautiful "landscape" during the epidemic.

　　The 2020 Global Robot Statistics Report shows that global sales of professional service robots increased by 32%, reaching US$11.2 billion in 2019. Zhou Jian, founder of UBTECH Robotics, said that the past decade was a 10-year reserve period for service robots, and the next 10 years will be a golden period for development. More and more service robot solutions will be applied in vertical fields. "In the next 10 years, there may be a trillion-level service robot company."

　　Service robots are part of my country's AI strategy. In December 2017, the "Three-Year Action Plan for Promoting the Development of the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018-2020)" proposed that by 2020, smart home service robots and smart public service robots will be mass-produced and applied. The Prospective Industry Research Institute predicts that the sales volume of service robots in my country will exceed 500,000 units by 2023, with sales revenue expected to reach US$27.7 billion.