Introduction: With the advent of the DT era, big data and artificial intelligence have been incorporated into the national strategic plan, and related industries in this field have been enthusiastically sought after by capital, and were even warned by many Internet giants to "beware of the artificial intelligence bubble". As of the end of 2017, the scale of investment and financing in the field of artificial intelligence has reached 180 billion yuan, with an average amount of nearly 600 million yuan per transaction.
With the spread of artificial intelligence, in addition to private equity funds, industrial capital has also become more active. Investment institutions under Baidu, Tencent, Ali, Qualcomm, and Lenovo have repeatedly invested heavily in AI star companies. Among them, companies with massive data. BAT's actions are of particular interest. Before that, half of the mobile Internet had been occupied by BAT, but now, "artificial intelligence companies" are becoming BAT's new major investment targets. Although BAT has a large amount of data, none of the startups have the genes of pure AI. Therefore, for Internet giants, the layout of AI is the layout of the future. Below, this article will carry out a specific inventory, and what kind of investment and financing strategy BAT has made in the field of artificial intelligence.
Author / Source: THU Data Pi (ID: datapi)
01 Baidu
In September 2016, Baidu announced the establishment of Baidu Ventures, focusing on investing in early projects of next-generation technological innovations such as artificial intelligence and AR/VR. Robin Li personally served as chairman and participated in the evaluation and judgment of important projects.
Liu Wei, CEO of Baidu Ventures, once said in an interview with the media: "(Baidu Ventures) is not only investing in artificial intelligence technology in a narrow sense, but laying out the era of artificial intelligence, creating a platform that includes underlying intelligent technology, intelligent machine platforms, and industry intelligence. Three-layer artificial intelligence ecology.” According to observations, Baidu’s own three major laboratories have achieved leading advantages in AI underlying software technology, and investment and acquisition projects are more focused on “intelligent machine platforms” and “industry intelligence” These two levels are mainly based on Baidu's two core artificial intelligence businesses: DuerOS smart home ecological chain and Apollo unmanned driving system.
In 2017, Baidu announced "All in AI". The following picture is a summary of Baidu's investment and acquisition projects in the field of artificial intelligence in 2017. It can be seen that Baidu's investment in artificial intelligence is mainly in image processing, speech recognition, driverless, large Data, intelligent hardware device manufacturers and designers, etc.
Tang Hesong, the former head of Baidu's investment department, once said that Baidu's investment and mergers and acquisitions are closely related to "strategy" and do not pursue financial investment. Specifically, it includes three aspects: "strengthening of core business", "establishment of ecosystem" and "foreign layout". Baidu itself has strong artificial intelligence research and development capabilities, and has supplemented the technology ecosystem through domestic and foreign investment, such as visual computing company xPerception, financial technology company ZestFinance, lidar company VelodyneLiDAR, smart chip company Shanghai Hanfeng, and Israeli video capture technology company Pixellot, New Zealand-based VR company 8i, and Japanese native advertising company popIn are among the first to occupy high-quality technology assets. By investing in Truck Gang, Raven, NIO, etc., Baidu's artificial intelligence business scenarios have been gradually enriched.
▲ Image source: Sprout
Baidu once boasted that it would invest in at least 10 AI startups in 2018. Sure enough, in the first quarter of the year, almost all of the six fields that Baidu invested in could be preceded by "AI". Not to mention its 7 investments in the hardware field for the time being, only in the medical and health field, all 5 companies invested by Baidu have used artificial intelligence technology. The Heart of the Machine and Aqiu Technology are also Baidu's explorations in the field of AI+. From the investment trends in Q1 2018, it can be seen that in addition to expanding the investment sector in the field of intelligent hardware, which has been a key layout, Baidu has also increased investment in the first echelon of artificial intelligence landing fields such as medical care, finance, and automobiles.
02 Alibaba
Earlier, Xie Ying, investment director of Alibaba, introduced in an exclusive interview with domestic media: "Ali investment is mainly divided into two categories: one is strongly coupled investment based on Alibaba's physical business, which enhances the group's business through acquisitions and investment, Improve efficiency; the other type is path-finding investment, the current business relationship is not strong, but we believe that it will also have an impact on the future of the industry, such as artificial intelligence technology.”
In the field of artificial intelligence, Alibaba has invested the most in infrastructure and general technologies. In important directions such as voice, vision, robotics, and chips, Alibaba has made frequent layouts, and has continuously strengthened investment in the application layer of "artificial intelligence + industry". .
Looking back at Ali's "AI capital history" in the past two years, the investment direction involves many applications of AI in subdivided vertical fields, including blockchain, edge computing, new storage, quantum computing, etc.
The following figure is an inventory of Alibaba's foreign investment in the field of artificial intelligence:
Overall, Ali's investment can be divided into two parts:
Part of it is to do a relatively strong integration with Ali's existing business. Relatively speaking, this part of Ali will take the method of controlling (majority equity, wholly-owned);
On the other hand, Alibaba has taken minority equity investments among its numerous investments. Alibaba itself is a company that built an ecosystem as a platform, so Alibaba actually emphasizes the layout in the ecosystem and everyone's win-win situation.
So far, through the incorporation of enterprises, Alibaba has achieved full coverage from hardware, solutions to products. In the field of AI chips alone, Alibaba has invested in 5 companies, including Zhongtian Micro, Cambrian, and Shenjian Technology. , Barefoot Network, Kneron and other well-known companies, the chip strategic layout has begun to take shape;
At the same time, Alibaba has also achieved full coverage of AI application scenarios . Taking the voice field as an example, the voice chip of Cambrian and the voice solution of Spitsch can generate more collaboration possibilities. Xpeng Motors has fully applied various key technologies such as voice navigation and voice recognition control. In addition, Alibaba's Alibaba YunOS and Shenma Search have chosen Yunzhisheng as their voice control solution partner since 2014 and 2015 respectively. After the integration of the intelligent voice industry, they will be able to form a business closed loop;
On the other hand, the talents of various artificial intelligence enterprises collected by Ali will also help the industrialization of Ali's artificial intelligence. For example, after investing in SenseTime, the largest deep learning research team in Asia owned by SenseTime will also help Ali's artificial intelligence. Smart layout. Not only that, the business alliance linked by Lakeside University is gradually forming an "AI Huangpu Military Academy". For example, Jiang Shuomiao, founder and CEO of Zhuyun Technology, who has received Alibaba’s B round of financing, is the first student of Lakeside University. In the recent list of students of Lakeside University, Yin Qi from Face++, Huang Wei from Yunzhisheng, and Video++ The founders of many well-known AI companies such as Jin Zhengji Cang have been recruited to the "Principal Ma".
03 Tencent
Among the three BAT companies, Tencent started late in the field of artificial intelligence and was more business-driven, and then gradually increased investment and fully blossomed. Tencent established the Industrial Win-Win Ecological Fund in 2011 to support and acquire some high-quality enterprises, focusing on building an ecological chain. The play style of Tencent Investment is characterized by the widest reach and the largest number of tracks.
According to the number of BAT's investment companies, Tencent is the leader, and it has many layouts in pan-entertainment, games, video and other fields. In comparison, Tencent's investment in AI seems to be inconspicuous, but it has a clear focus.From this year's investment list, we can see that Tencent has focused on two traditional fields that are waiting for AI technology to bring efficiency improvements - medical care and robotics.
As of December last year, Tencent had invested in more than 30 companies in the medical field, with a total investment of more than 20 billion yuan. In the first quarter of this year, Tencent invested in Atomwise and Jingtai Technology in the AI + medical field. In terms of robotics, Tencent has invested in a number of related companies. In addition to investment, Tencent has also established the Tencent AI Accelerator to help AI entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial projects. Among the 25 selected projects of the Tencent AI Accelerator, 10 are related to robotics. In the future, Tencent is likely to continue to invest in robotics Unleash investment firepower.
The following picture shows Tencent's investment and acquisition inventory in the field of artificial intelligence:
It is not difficult to see from the table that Tencent's play method is to deploy multiple companies in the same field, that is, to select the track and then bet on multiple players on the track. On the one hand, this can reduce investment risks, and on the other hand, it will also reduce investment risks. It can help Tencent AI-driven business at the core product level to better land.
04 In which areas does BAT "love and kill" in AI?
▲ Source of all BAT investment projects in 2017: IT Orange
From the perspective of cooperation, Baidu and Tencent have the most cooperation: Yiche.com, WM Motor, Weilai Automobile, Lianjia.com, and Huochebang. In March this year, Baidu and Tencent jointly invested in Atomwise, an AI drug research and development company. It is their only intersection in overseas medical investment; Tencent and Ali have no cooperation; Baidu and Ali have cooperation on TigerGraph.
There are not many projects that the three BATs cooperate with each other, but the fields of collision are extremely intense.
1. Smart Voice Market
As a major innovation in human-computer interaction, the next-generation service portal, the next Android, the control center of the home... All kinds of expectations have made the conversational AI for smart devices the most fiercely contested field for BAT. The three BAT companies are eager to open source at the system level through intelligent voice assistants, carry more service and hardware partners, link more terminals, and establish a new ecological platform for the realization of the "Internet of Everything" scenario.
At present, Baidu has DuerOS, Ali has AliGenie, and Tencent has at least two: Tencent Cloud Xiaowei and Dingdong of the Mobile Internet Business Group (MIG).
Within half a year of its release, Baidu's DuerOS open platform has added more than 130 partners, implemented more than 20 hardware solutions, and added more than 5 DuerOS-equipped devices every month, covering home, vehicle, and mobile scenarios, set-top boxes, TVs, refrigerators, speakers, robots, vehicles, mobile phones, headphones and other equipment. As a key development area, in addition to building a large AI team in Beijing and Silicon Valley, Baidu has also acquired two startups: Kitt.ai, which does voice interaction and natural language understanding, and Raven, which launched the raven H speaker.
In addition to music playback, Ali's Tmall Genie can also realize functions such as smart home control, voice shopping, mobile phone recharge, takeout order, and phone bill charging. It has built-in AliGenie voice assistant and developer platform, through which developers can link to consumers, life and business scenarios in the Ali ecosystem. In January this year, Alibaba AI Lab released IoTConnect, an open connection protocol for the Internet of Things, which enables smart devices to connect, automatically form a network, and automatically adapt and support the voice control of Tmall Genie. Ali may not have Baidu's deep technical accumulation in intelligent voice interaction, but on this platform, Ali emphasizes the service capabilities that products can provide in the future. Ali's advantage is that, like Amazon, it has a unique business ecosystem, and its products come with business scenarios.
As for Tencent, the competition among its internal teams has not yet been decided. Among the two teams that made public appearances, Dingdang was released in April 2017 as a "voice assistant" in the form of an App, and on December 20, the first cooperative hardware 1More headset was released. Up to now, although Dingdang has not launched something called "hardware open platform", their "ecological partner program" has indeed been very effective. Youbixuan is a robot, Harman is a speaker, GAC is a car manufacturer, and More than 20 hardware manufacturers such as Meizu and Nubia for mobile phones are on the list of cooperation cases of Tencent Dingdong. The hardware open platform and skill open platform of Tencent Cloud Xiaowei are still in the state of internal testing. Except for the robot built with Asus, there is not much news about partners.
2. Autonomous driving
Last year, the topic of "autonomous driving" seemed to be exclusive to Baidu, and by the end of 2017, all three BAT companies had already entered the game.
Baidu, which entered the game first, is no longer at the same stage of development as Alibaba and Tencent. Baidu's Apollo self-driving platform has now released version 2.0, and has reached cooperation with more than 90 companies such as Bosch, Continental, FAW, Changan, Chery, BAIC, and King Long around Apollo. According to Lu Qi, Apollo is the Android system in the field of autonomous driving, but it will be more open. The Apollo platform and Xiaodu in-vehicle system will provide future car manufacturers with a more open software platform and in-vehicle operating system, allowing them to quickly build their own autonomous driving systems. According to the plan, in 2018-2020, Baidu will speed up the opening speed until it can finally enable its partners to complete fully autonomous driving.
In addition, Baidu has invested in Velodyne, the core manufacturer of lidar, a key component of autonomous driving, and xPerception, a related technology developer. In terms of automobiles, Baidu has invested in WM Motor, and also invested in the shared travel platform Shouqi.
As for Tencent, in November last year, Tencent launched the "AI in Car" system of car linkage at the Global Partner Conference to open up Tencent's AI-based link capabilities and ecological resources. In terms of investment, Tencent has made a lot of money. It has successively invested in start-up companies Weilai and Weimar, and invested 5% of Tesla's equity in the secondary market, and even secretly invested in an autonomous driving company in Silicon Valley. It is said that Tencent's own autonomous driving business has now reached the stage of comprehensive research and development and multiple road tests.
Ali is the latest to enter the field of autonomous driving. In October last year, Banma Network, a joint venture between Alibaba and SAIC, launched the Banma Zhixing system upgraded to version 2.0, and cooperated with Shenlong Motors, the first smart car equipped with AliOS will land on Dongfeng Citroen. Major American manufacturers Ford and Tier 1 supplier Delphi are also partners of Ali. In addition to these partners, Ali has also invested in a domestic electric vehicle manufacturer: Xiaopeng. Ali CEO Zhang Yong once said that Ali "will not do driverless cars". However, Ali's actions to build an in-vehicle operating system have been ongoing. In mid-December last year, positions in artificial intelligence laboratories (AI Labs) related to autonomous driving began to appear on Alibaba's official website, proving that Alibaba's autonomous driving business is still in the stage of recruiting.
In addition to investing in complete vehicles and related technologies, BAT also includes various smart hardware products such as smart rearview mirrors and car boxes in their respective autonomous driving "enclosure campaigns". The automobile industry is in the window period of transformation and upgrading to electrification and intelligence, and the trend of intelligence has become unstoppable. In the face of such a huge market, BAT will inevitably seize the opportunity to focus on the layout.
3. Medical field
In the field of AI + medical care, Baidu was the first to enter the game. In October 2016, "Baidu Medical Brain" was released in Beijing. It is an artificial intelligence product design through the collection and analysis of massive medical data and professional literature. At first, Baidu's medical layout mainly focused on medical information search, and then expanded to services such as registration appointments, online consultations, and drug delivery e-commerce. In February last year, Baidu officially announced that the focus of its medical business will be in the field of artificial intelligence, and the business of the original Baidu Medical Division was shut down. Robin Li's explanation for this is that Baidu will use artificial intelligence to continue to participate in the medical field. For example, intelligent registration, intelligent diagnosis and treatment, collection of genetic data, pharmaceutical research and development, etc.
In this field, there has been no news of Baidu's progress since some teams in the medical division transferred to the AI system, but Tencent and Alibaba are both preempting the layout.
At the end of March 2017, Ali ET Medical Brain made its debut, but not all of its technologies came from Ali, but gathered many partners to provide services together, such as Yiyuan Intelligence for skin testing, Huiyi Medical for analyzing medical records, etc. The current Alibaba Cloud ET medical brain can provide functions such as image intelligent diagnosis, intelligent medical record diagnosis, voice doctor order entry, medical intention recognition, auxiliary management decision-making, family chronic disease management, and DNA sequence analysis. In terms of medical treatment, Ali has also cooperated with BGI, Shanghai Huashan Hospital, Zhejiang Health and Family Planning Commission and other institutions. In addition, Ali also made some investment layouts in medical care last year, including Jiahe Meikang and Prenetics.
As for Tencent, among the first batch of national new-generation artificial intelligence open innovation platforms, Tencent was selected as the medical imaging platform "Miying". Tencent Miying was released in August 2017, and the first launch was early esophageal cancer screening. Later, Miying launched early lung cancer screening, diabetic retinopathy screening, early breast cancer screening and other medical imaging technologies, and also launched AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment products based on natural language processing and intelligent management of medical records. Tencent Miying combines the AI technology of AI lab, Tencent Youtu, TEG Architecture Platform Department and other teams, and is led by the Internet + Cooperation Division. In less than half a year since its launch, Tencent Miying already has more than a dozen partners, including Siemens Healthcare, the Second Hospital of Lanzhou University, Shenzhen Nanshan People's Hospital, and Zhongshan Hospital.
Because the open environment of the medical field and the Internet is very different, the scarcity and monopoly of resources, the high supervision of the policy, the closed data, the fragmentation of the disease market, all kinds of difficulties have made the progress of BAT in the field of AI + medical treatment difficult, perhaps these three companies The reasons for focusing on acquiring overseas AI medical companies.
Throughout the past two or three years, BAT has invested more and more in the field of artificial intelligence, and has invested heavily in the first echelon of artificial intelligence applications, such as autonomous driving, medical care, speech recognition, image recognition, and big data analysis. . In general, BAT's investment in the AI field is more inclined to companies whose technology has actual commercial value. All three companies make supplementary or defensive investments around their businesses on the basis of retaining their own advantageous fields. Perhaps, companies are trying their best to make up for their shortcomings and bet on the future. After all, none of the three companies dares to relax when it comes to betting on the future. Let's see what kind of new pattern the artificial intelligence industry will have in 2018, driven by BAT giants.
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