After the advent of ChatGPT, the Internet finally saw the dawn of change.
Looking back at the journey of the Internet, almost every ten years or so, new application scenarios will be born due to changes in products and technologies.
In the 2000s, with the gradual maturity of PC products, desktop Internet became the "main theme" of the times. In this context, companies such as search engines, antivirus, and social media have created amazing business miracles.
In the 1910s, with the increasingly rich functions of portable smart phones, the limelight of the mobile Internet overshadowed the desktop Internet. In this era, Internet companies mainly combine the sensor characteristics of smartphones to carry out business layout and create new business models such as taxis, short videos, and local life.
With the peak of mobile Internet traffic dividends and the explosion of ChatGPT, more and more Internet companies believe that the latter will bring a new round of changes to the Internet. In an interview with the German business newspaper "Handelsblatt", Bill Gates said, "ChatGPT is as important as the invention of the Internet and will change the world."
In this context, some domestic companies have also carried out AI large-scale model layout, including 360.
On April 21, 2023, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, issued an internal letter entitled "360 Artificial Intelligence General Mobilization", asking the company to fully embrace artificial intelligence, adapt to human-machine collaboration, and start product remodeling. In the future, it will rely on "360 Intelligence "Brain" is "fighting a protracted battle" in the field of AI large models.
Source: 360
In the internal letter, Zhou Hongyi believes that 360 is "extraordinarily talented in the core elements of large language models such as data acquisition and cleaning, artificial knowledge training, and scenarios." With the gradual landing of "360 Smart Brain", 360 may create a new era.
AI competition is heating up, 360 high-profile entry
According to QuestMobile data, as of the end of 2022, the monthly activity of China's mobile Internet will be 1.203 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of only 2.47%. At the same time, because entrepreneurs have tried their best to meet the needs of users through smartphones, the mobile Internet has not innovated in business models and product forms for many years.
There are various indications that China's mobile Internet is far away from words such as innovation and revolution. The huge competitive pressure has also prompted many Internet companies to explore new platform-level entrances.
After experiencing the "collapse" of technologies with more concepts than actual value, such as metaverse and blockchain, the sudden explosion of ChatGPT finally gave hope to many Internet companies.
In November 2022, OpenAI officially launched ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence technology. This tool can not only conduct conversations by understanding and learning human language, but also complete emails, video scripts, copywriting and other tasks. Because the product power is too "sci-fi", ChatGPT came out only two months ago, and the monthly active scale exceeded 100 million, becoming the fastest growing consumer application in history.
In fact, ChatGPT's imagination goes beyond dialogue. Zhou Hongyi believes that "the big language model is a new industrial revolution, and any app, software, website, and application is worth reshaping."
Because of the huge commercial value contained in AI large models, since 2023, major companies have deployed related businesses one after another. The Minsheng Securities research report shows that there are currently more than 30 companies laying out large models. On the whole, most of the large models of these enterprises are related to their own advantageous businesses, but they are mainly based on a unified AI base, covering NLP, vision and other fields at the general model layer, and incubating industry models and scenario models.
For example, on March 16, 2023, Baidu released "Wen Xin Yi Yan", which has achieved multi-modal interaction; on April 10, at the technical exchange meeting, SenseTime brought "SenseChat", Based on the large model system, the AI content creation community platform "Miaohua", the AI digital human video generation platform "Ruying", and the 3D content generation platform "Qiongyu" were built; on April 11, Ali launched the "Tongyi Qian Ask", and said that "in the future, all Alibaba products will be connected to 'Tongyi Qianwen'".
The battle of AI large-scale models is about to start, and 360 is also making a high-profile entry at this time.
In the PC Internet era, 360 has become a major entrance for netizens to surf the Internet by virtue of free search engines, anti-virus software, browsers and other products. In today's era of large-scale models, the dividends of the PC Internet industry are already very limited, and 360 also needs to dig more increments. Therefore, as soon as ChatGPT came out of the circle, 360 launched related products.
At the Digital Security and Development Summit Forum held on March 29, 2023, Zhou Hongyi released the 360 version of GPT, only ten days later than Baidu, and it was almost the first batch of AI large-scale model products in China. In the increasingly fierce competition for large models, how much share can the 360 version of GPT take?
What are the chances of winning in 360 with a big model?
Since most of the products are not yet fully open to the public, in fact, most of the current large-scale models of companies are not competing for core AI capabilities, but for publicity, channels, and capital investment.
For example, since the official announcement in February, Baidu announced that more than 650 companies have announced access to the Wenxin Yiyan ecosystem, but these companies have not yet brought enough imaginative products to the consumer market. Coincidentally, Zhang Yong declared that in the future, Alibaba's products will be fully transformed by accessing the large model of "Tongyi Qianwen", but the perception at the user level is not strong now.
The reason why the large models of various companies are currently in the stage of "painting cakes" instead of directly competing with core technologies may be because many Internet companies cannot widen the gap in terms of computing power and data, which makes the capabilities of large models converge.
In this regard, on April 26, 2023, at the Minsheng Securities Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum, Zhou Hongyi said that the capabilities of various large models are almost the same. At present, no one can lead far and dominate the world. The decisive factor for winning in the end is the "scenario" Only companies with scenes can occupy a leading position in the future competition in the large-scale model industry. Therefore, Baidu, which is also in the search field, continues to accelerate the coverage of large-scale model scenarios of "Wen Xin Yi Yan". It mainly takes the "big and comprehensive" route, covering scenarios involving e-commerce, tourism, finance, government affairs, etc. And 360 directly combines the large model with the search engine scene.
Zhou Hongyi has a clear plan for the implementation of his own large-scale model. After "360 Smart Brain" is the first to implement the search scene, the smart browser combined with GPT capabilities, AI image generation tools and enterprise smart marketing cloud will soon be open to B-end users for testing. In this regard, Zhou Hongyi said, "360 is not going to serve the table with a 'Manchu Banquet', but to focus on the needs of users, mature a scene, and open a scene."
In fact, ChatGPT has verified the feasibility of the 360 strategy. In January 2023, the US version of Toutiao BuzzFeed announced a partnership with OpenAI and will use ChatGPT to create content in the future. As soon as the news came out, BuzzFeed's stock price rose by 119.88% in a single day.
It is worth mentioning that 360 has accumulated considerable B-end customer resources after years of operating government and enterprise security, which may also provide confidence for it to promote the implementation of AI large-scale model scenarios. The 2022 financial report shows that 360 Digital Security Group has completed new contracts with nearly 2,000 customers, covering more than 90% of central ministries and commissions, 80% of central enterprises, 95% of large financial institutions and 100% of operators. Millions of small and medium-sized enterprises have launched network security cooperation.
Source: 360 2022 financial report
In addition to emphasizing the importance of "scenario", Zhou Hongyi also said that the key to developing a large model is the "six big", namely big data, big labeling, big computing power, big algorithm, big model, big flow, the most important of which is What is more important is the large traffic, and the large model can only be continuously improved under the continuous use and feedback of users.
It is understood that the average MAU of 360 browsers is 416 million, and the average daily search requests of 360 exceed 1 billion times. This sets a good tone for the subsequent traffic operation of the large model.
Based on the experience of ChatGPT, 360 does have unique advantages in terms of large model data. According to official data, the knowledge of GPT-3 comes from a training corpus of 300 billion words, of which 60% comes from the C4 corpus from 2016 to 2019 (some text snapshots of the entire network), and 22% comes from WebText2 (more than 3 points in the Reddit website Response to the data set obtained). And 360's search engine share in China is close to 40%, crawling hundreds of billions or even trillions of web pages, and accumulating 600 million questions and answers.
In terms of technology, in order to seize the dividends of the market as soon as possible, 360 has been conducting research and development of artificial intelligence-related technologies for the past few years. The 2022 financial report shows that since 2019, 360 Artificial Intelligence Research Institute has "continuously invested in artificial intelligence technologies including general-purpose large models." In 2022, 360's research and development expenses will be 3.314 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.92%. The increase is mainly due to the company's research on core hard technologies such as security and artificial intelligence.
On the whole, the explosion of ChatGPT provides an excellent development opportunity for 360. On the one hand, the massive data accumulated by 360 search provides abundant training resources for large AI models. On the other hand, 360 continues to increase investment in research and development. This also explains why 360 is able to launch "360 Smart Brain" ahead of many Internet companies.
On this basis, 360 also has a clear plan for the commercialization of AI large-scale model products. Therefore, it has accumulated a stable government-enterprise relationship before, and the commercialization process of 360 AI large-scale models in the early stage will undoubtedly be fully guaranteed.
On April 22, 2023, Microsoft President Brad Smith stated to the public that "China's research institutions and companies will become ChatGPT's main competitors." In this regard, Zhou Hongyi also has a certain opinion. He believes that the development of artificial intelligence large language models will bring about a substantial increase in productivity and national competitiveness, and China has the ability to "catch up". Looking forward to the future, enterprises represented by 360 may lead China's large-scale models to stand in the forest of the world.