Artificial intelligence (AI) and the meta-universe, two heavyweight elements leading the development of technology and industry, are embracing each other at an accelerated pace, and thus showing more disruptive transformative forces. This year's World Conference on Artificial Intelligence is keen to capture this trend, focusing on "AI+ metaverse", around the topic of why AI is "connected" with the metaverse, how they will achieve each other, and what innovation breakthroughs will bring in the future. The participants generously contributed insights and golden sentences, and jointly presented a top-level thinking feast.
Each achievement
The most important breakthrough in AI over the past year has been the evolution of AI from recognizing content -- text, pictures, videos -- to creating content. Robin Li, Baidu's chairman and chief executive, described the phenomenon as "tremendous progress" and a "change in direction".
Mr. Li was on hand to show how Baidu AI, following text instructions, could create various paintings, including a Van Gogh-inspired Bund street scene, an impressionistic Shanghai along Bao, or write 40 essays for the national college entrance exam in just a few tens of seconds, ensuring that each score would be in the top quartile. Li believes AI will disrupt existing content generation models.
In fact, "Painter AI" will not only disrupt content, it will also fast-forward the evolution of the metaverse. When explaining the relationship between content-creating AI and the metaverse, Pan Yunhe, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Zhejiang University, said the metaverse needs two foundations - a large number of recognition devices and a large number of visual generation. In this way, the metaverse can project the physical world and human society into the information space. Therefore, AI, which can create content, is essential to the metaverse 39bet-xì dách-phỏm miền bắc-tiến lên miền bắc-xóc đĩa-game bắn cá.
The metaverse relies on the power of AI, which in turn can self-evolve in the metaverse with unprecedented efficiency. John Riccitiello, Unity's global CEO, gives an example: Self-driving cars are a hot topic of research today, but before humans can safely hand over the steering wheel to an AI, it must be trained to drive in millions of road conditions. However, many training scenarios are often impossible to find, but it would be very easy to simulate such an environment in the Metaverse instead. In fact, by training AI on "synthetic data" from virtual worlds, researchers have had positive results -- in some cases, the training time may be reduced from months to seconds.
The metaverse and AI's "two-way rush" has another factor in its favor: an explosion of computing power. The key to AI's recent ability to "create content" and the metaverse's increasingly realistic representation of the world is that they are now supported by ever greater computational resources. Hu Houkun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, said that more than 20 cities in China are building computing centers, which creates good conditions for the development of AI and the metaverse.
A wonderful idea
The miracle of AI and the metaverse has just begun, but it has already created some impressive applications. Online clothing sales currently create a $750 billion a year market and are expected to soon top the trillion-dollar mark, according to Philip Tol, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. But the industry loses billions of dollars a year in returns because clothes don't fit or don't like them. In fact, consumers could potentially save billions of dollars simply by taking a picture of themselves with their phone before placing an order, and then "trying it on" in the metaverse with the help of AI's deep learning models.
There is also an obvious business opportunity to generate digital avatars using AI+ metaverse. 'We can put virtual people in customer service positions to take calls from customers,' Mr. Toll said. But if you create a virtual human and it becomes a household name, then you can make it a star of advertising. "It's a very interesting and very big market."
When it comes to metaverse, Facebook parent Meta Platforms can't be ignored. 'The Metaverse is not about replacing the real world, but about providing richer content, immersive experiences, and making time spent online more meaningful,' said Leung Young-berry, CEO of Meta Greater China. In 2030, the metacosmic economy is expected to contribute more than US $3 trillion to the world's gross domestic product (GDP), of which the Asia-Pacific region will contribute more than US $1 trillion, she said, citing statistics.
The metaverse is bound to bring new experiences to consumers, but its more important applications may actually be in business. Jiang Changjun, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Tongji University, introduced a very special current research direction -- financial simulators. In a sense, it is like a "financial metaverse" that brings together regulators such as the central bank and the banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, large state-owned banks and numerous small and medium-sized financial institutions. With it, the country no longer needs to spend a lot of energy on selecting some regions to carry out small-scale pilot projects before implementing a financial reform. Instead, it can directly launch the policy in the simulator, evaluate its effects, and deeply analyze the ripple effects caused by it. It can be said that the "AI+ meta-universe" has full potential to prevent systemic financial risks.
"The metaverse is the future of the Internet." Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Ammon said in a speech. But he also stressed that our understanding of how the metaverse will affect and change thousands of industries and families may only be the tip of the iceberg.
Cross is the king
Not only will this "epic collision" between AI and the metaverse create a vast new field of research and wealth, but it will also further inspire people to pay more attention to the intersection of AI with other disciplines, which will likely lead to new changes.
When it comes to the five most noteworthy directions in artificial intelligence, Yao Chi-chi, director of the Shanghai Institute of Intelligence and a Turing Award winner, saves the last and most important point for AI+X. The first thing many people think of when they think of "AI+X" is all kinds of fancy technology shows, but in reality, the intersection of AI and other fields is likely to lead to very important original research at the root, he said. For example, the application of artificial intelligence in architecture may generate new building methods and building materials, "which is just beginning and very meaningful work."
Zhang Yaqin, a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University, revealed that the institute is currently recruiting a group of leading talents with industrial background and academic acumen in various fields around the world to promote the intersection of AI and various disciplines. His favorite direction is "AI+ life science." At present, with gene sequencing, high-throughput experiments, brain machine interface, biochip technology matures, vast amounts of data are generated, makes the brain and the body, genes, cells, proteins in the digital, a new algorithm of superimposed on AI, big force, life science is rapidly into the digital era, 3.0 to form a new intelligent science paradigm.
There is another "crossover" worth mentioning, which happens when the AI+ Metaverse collaborates with real space explorers. Li Di, chief scientist of FAST, a 500-meter aperture radio telescope called China Eye, said the astronomy community is trying to import data collected from space into VR (virtual reality) and then cruise in this "meta-cosmic universe". With the full potential of the whole senses being unleashed, they really saw some very weak signals that had been missed.
Xu Li, CEO of Sensetime, said that today's artificial intelligence research, both down-to-earth and looking at the stars, is this combination that makes it possible for AI to go further. "We have great expectations for what AI can do in the future."