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Text丨Liu Yuqi, editor丨Wang Yisu
"Puppies of different breeds line up to pass 'real-name authentication', and facial recognition can not only identify people, but also dogs." "Faces, irises, and palm prints are no longer considered black technologies. Brain print recognition is truly irreplaceable."
At the 2023 Shanghai Bund Conference, 6G, unmanned security testing laboratory, brain tattoo core body, antjian 2.0, city chain, AI brain training, payment core... the top ten black technologies that will change the future were at the conference They all appeared together, full of a strong sense of technology. As IDC said, a new era of great technological change has begun, and AI will be everywhere.
Surprisingly, many core technologies originate from the same company - Ant Group. This company, which was once almost synonymous with Alipay, is no longer a payment company.
Looking back at the past of Ant, after going through three stages from payment tools, financial technology companies, and then technology companies, Ant has become farther and farther away from financial attributes, and at the same time, it has become more and more technological.
The evolution of ants is a process of constantly improving technology. When Alipay was first established in 2004, Ant, represented by Alipay, focused on building payment tools; in 2016, it entered the second stage. After accumulating a large number of users, it innovated finance through technological means and built an open platform. Now, Ant has entered the third stage. Ant has gradually extended its technology from the financial scene and truly served thousands of industries as a technology company.
Jiang Guofei, President of Ant Group’s Digital Technology Business Group
"A few years ago, Ant Group established a digital sector. We adhere to technology-driven, product-driven and open win-win, build digital trust through technology, and promote industry collaboration." Jiang Guofei, president of Ant Group's digital technology business group, summarized Ant Digital The context of development.
Ant is driven by technology. It will first develop financial-level technical capabilities in the financial scene. Then it will further transform the accumulated technical capabilities into products and gradually open them to thousands of industries.
Leaving the comfort zone, the technological genes are purer, the prospects are longer-term, and the business space is larger.
According to statistics from the Academy of Information and Communications Technology, my country's database market size will be 40.36 billion yuan in 2022, and is expected to reach 127.68 billion yuan in 2023. The development momentum of the blockchain track cannot be underestimated. According to a report from the China Research Institute of Puhua Industry, the scale of my country's blockchain industry will be approximately 6.7 billion yuan in 2022, with a compound growth rate of approximately 77% in the past three years.
01 Born out of finance, grew into a technology company
From the technical support of digital payment, Ant has found a "data value chain".
"Technological development is like transporting goods by railway. We not only need small stations, but also rails, cars, loading and unloading, road safety and other elements to ensure circulation. Blockchain technology is just like intertwined and complex railway tracks." Jiang Guofei often uses "road construction" to describe Ant Digital's insistence on basic technology: "If we don't build so many highways, we won't be able to sell as many cars."
From the perspective of the entire technical architecture, using data as a production factor to circulate in the industrial chain is the main idea of Ant Digital. In order to ensure the smooth and safe data circulation, many subdivided technical requirements have been generated, such as artificial intelligence, cloud native, distributed databases, security technology, privacy computing, etc., which gradually formed the big tree of Ant Digital Technology.
As we all know, Ant’s early core business originated from transactions in the financial scene.
In order to protect a huge trading system, the first step of Ant Technology is to confirm data rights. Blockchain technology can ensure the reliability of data confirmation and circulation, just like the "railway" that transports data.
The second step of the transaction is the safe circulation of data. This involves security technology based on "private computing". Through the "available and invisible" method, it ensures that data can only be used and insightful, but cannot be stolen or copied.
But these two technologies alone are far from being able to support the operation of a complete technical system. Therefore, in order to process data more securely and efficiently, Ant has built its own distributed database; in order to move from PC payment to mobile payment, it has developed a series of IoT-related technologies by itself, and has achieved payment security at the chip level; in order to allow computer vision, etc. Artificial intelligence technology is applied in 1.4 billion terminals, challenging the limits of end-side AI; and almost all of these underlying and middle-end technologies must run on the cloud, so cloud-native capabilities are required.
In this way, as the business grows, Ant has forged a series of "iron steel bones" of technology. However, before, these technologies were just silently hidden behind the scenes. But starting in 2020, as Ant Group’s technology business gradually becomes independent, these technologies must be formed into products before they can truly be oriented to industrial customers.
As a result, Ant established its database business OceanBase as an independent company and upgraded the Ant Chain brand. At the beginning of 2022, based on the prediction of digital development trends, Ant Group established a digital technology business group to integrate products and services in blockchain, cloud technology, security and other fields.
Through the construction of the data value chain, ants have gradually formed their own multi-dimensional and three-dimensional technology product system like an "ant nest".
This product system has completed the digitization of a single point of organization, to the digital collaboration of the entire industry chain, and then to the trusted value interconnection between various industry chains. From points to lines and from lines to areas, the entire digital intelligence has been constructed. of the base.
For example, among the three core technology products for institutional digitization, the main focus is to lower the usage threshold for enterprises, mainly financial institutions, and improve collaboration efficiency: the mobile development platform mPaaS allows financial institutions to build their own products more simply and building blocks. The App satisfies the first level of primary needs of financial institutions in serving users in the mobile Internet era, and is also the most sensitive and frequent demand for users; SOFAStack cloud-native PaaS platform is backward compatible with heterogeneous IaaS and upwardly supports heterogeneous SaaS, with almost no access threshold, supports the middle office of financial institutions; while the OceanBase distributed database provides financial-level data security and transaction processing capabilities, which is the core underlying data capability of financial institutions.
The ants "set up the stage", this is not the work of one person or a day's work.
The characteristics of an ant nest are that there is a universe inside, interconnected, and the structure is complex but extremely solid. This is due to the huge and diligent worker ant colony that piles up the sand and clay grains one by one to form "concrete". The ants have also benefited from the current technological fortress. It is the combination of the continuous lifeline of technology and the continuous upgrading of products.
02 Technology tempering and evolving with the times
"In the field of distributed cloud native, Ant has been engaged for 15 years. Since 2007, it has selected a distributed architecture for internal use and has iterated on 4 versions." Ma Zhenxiong, product director of Ant Group's Digital Technology Business Group, once mentioned .
This shows that technical skills cannot be achieved in one day. In fact, the financial scene has always been a training ground for digitalization in major industries. Under high-intensity training, Ant has been constantly forced to upgrade its technical capabilities. Among them, what Ant values most is its “safety” technical capabilities.
"Payment security is our lifeline." Yan Ying, director of blockchain technology at Ant Group, recalled the mobile Internet era and said that ensuring transaction security is the top priority of Ant Technology.
Since the beginning of the mobile Internet era, Ant has focused on network security construction. At that time, the biggest security threats faced by Ant came from cyber attacks and phishing websites. Once the payment account is leaked, the consequences will be disastrous. To this end, Ant has built a complete Internet security system, including multiple capabilities such as application firewalls, threat intelligence, and virus laboratories.
After entering the Internet of Things era, mobile terminals are gradually spreading to other terminals such as mobile cash registers and hotel POS machines. The devices are massive and scattered. How to ensure high-level security at low cost?
The wearable device "Payment Chip" launched by Alipay and Huawei Wear is a practical example.
According to the cooperation between Alipay and Huawei at the Bund Conference, the "Payment Core" pre-installs Alipay's payment component in an independent encryption chip. When consumers need to activate payment, they bind their Alipay account through the Internet to display the second-hand payment function on the wearable payment device. You can pay with QR code. This integrated solution of software and hardware has higher security, shorter development cycle, and wider use scenarios.
At this stage, Ant began to extend from software technology to comprehensive solutions that integrate “software and hardware”. This solution is also being extended to the industry. Based on the trustworthy characteristics of blockchain ledgers, Ant has begun to implant blockchain chips in IoT devices to ensure that the data of the devices are inherently trustworthy.
Jiang Guofei believes that this makes the device inherently digitally trustworthy and effectively solves the problem of data authenticity. This laid the foundation for the subsequent construction of digital assets, and also allowed Ant to quickly expand from financial business to more supply chain scenarios in traditional industries.
The industrial supply chain is a collaborative network surrounding the data supply chain. But in the era of large models of artificial intelligence, dimensionality enhancement technology also brings dimensionality challenges.
With the exponential explosion of data volume and large-scale application of data, the load and pressure on the entire computing engine are even greater challenges. Yan Ying once said: "In the future, a large amount of data and digital assets will flow in the digital world, which will also put forward higher and newer requirements for storage solutions."
"Trust issues are the biggest obstacle to efficient industrial collaboration." At the Bund Conference, Jiang Guofei clarified Ant Digital's next technological development focus.
According to Guangcone Intelligence, Ant Digital has launched a series of products such as Ant Chain (blockchain), Moss (private computing), Ant Shield (trusted artificial intelligence), and Quezhu (copyright technology) for the digitalization of industrial collaboration. , dedicated to solving pain points such as data security, value transfer and collaboration efficiency in the digitalization of industrial collaboration.
Ant is currently further upgrading the underlying technology. For example, in the data generation process, the Internet of Things can make the data source credible; in the data circulation process, blockchain technology can confirm data rights and prevent tampering; privacy computing technology ensures that data is circulated and In the fusion process, "the usable cannot be seen, the calculated cannot be recognized"; in the process of mining the value of data, the combination of artificial intelligence technology and scenarios can release the huge potential of data value.
Faced with the challenges brought by large models, Ant took the lead and established two major products, "Ant Tianjian" for security detection and security protection, using AI to protect AI.
It can be seen that with the development of the times, Ant is constantly iterating its technical capabilities around specific industries and industrial needs. With the evolution of the times, technology continues to grow through tempering.
03 From finance to various industries
“The current moment is a critical stage for institutional digitalization to move toward industrial digitalization.” Jiang Guofei emphasized on multiple occasions that in the future, industrial digital collaboration will be the greatest deterministic opportunity.
But industrial digitalization is a grand proposition. How can Ant enter various industries? The answer is, look at the future in the rearview mirror.
Finance is the best training ground for digitalization. Since Ant has long-term experience in serving the financial industry, it naturally needs to further develop in this high-quality track.
First of all, the technology demand in the financial industry is very strong. If before, technology was a tool for the financial industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, then now, technology has become the main driving force for further changes and leaps in the financial industry.
Wu Lianfeng, vice president and chief analyst of IDC China, believes that portable banking, AI risk control, digital employees, edge IoT and cloud-native architecture are the five major trends in bank digital technology in the future. IDC predicts that by 2025, more than 80% of banks will deploy digital people to provide 90% of customer service and financial consulting services. Moreover, 60% of China’s domestic banks will implement cloud-native digital core strategies. By 2026, applying artificial intelligence to credit granting will become a mainstream choice for banks.
Niu Xinzhuang, deputy president of the Postal Savings Bank, revealed that the Postal Savings Bank has invested 89.7 billion in technology in three years. In 2019, there were only a few hundred technology personnel at the head office, but today there are more than 4,000 technology-related personnel at the head office. people, the entire team has grown sixfold in just three or four years. Its board of directors also emphasized that technology is the most important goal this year.
But what is different from before is that Ant's position has undergone fundamental changes. From a payment tool and a financial technology platform, it has completely become a technology company. Relying on digital technology, Ant can help the financial industry complete the transition.
At the critical stage of the implementation of general large-scale models into the industry, Ant released the first industrial-level financial model with a scale of hundreds of billions at the 2023 Bund Conference. The Ant Financial large model integrates hundreds of billions of financial domain knowledge, and the platform has a complete matrix of digital financial tools. It can build a unified financial knowledge graph across data sources and realize the correlation and sorting of fragmented information. It solves the pain points of the current financial industry such as scattered data, complex data formats, and difficulty in getting through and sharing.
However, after so many years of intensive cultivation, Ant has accumulated a lot of underlying capabilities and general technologies, which are actually not limited to finance, but are also suitable for thousands of industries.
For example, in the field of bulk trade, Ant relies on blockchain and big data risk control technology to help Helian Group achieve real-time monitoring and risk management in the supply chain, greatly improving efficiency. In the field of new media content, artificial intelligence image recognition technology is used to proactively identify infringing and pirated content and help original creators safeguard their rights.
In the field of industrial manufacturing, Ant and Huatie Emergency jointly developed the mechanical trusted terminal T-box, which enables high-altitude working equipment to automatically connect to the blockchain, realizes the "on-chain" source of equipment operation data, and connects all parties through the blockchain. Improve equipment management and operational efficiency.
The ants are responsible for building roads, and the partners are responsible for building cars.
This is the accurate positioning Ant has given itself in the era of digital economy. Based on this positioning, Ant is getting further and further away from finance, but is getting closer and closer to industry with the help of technology.
At present, Ant Digital has worked with partners to launch more than 80 industry solutions, serving more than 10,000 companies, including public services, shipping logistics, industrial manufacturing, bulk commodities and other fields.
This year, Ant has also entered the deep water zone of the industry, expanding from a certain business to the digital transformation of the entire enterprise. Not only change, but re-creation can lead to a new round of change.
For example, GSBN, the world's first independent, non-profit shipping blockchain alliance, promotes the development of global trade through the operating system of Ant Chain technology. At present, blockchain technology is used to ensure that information is traceable and verifiable. It has realized the circulation of electronic bills of lading to replace paper bills of lading, ensuring trusted delivery and shortening the bill of lading processing time from days to hours. Currently, it has been used in nearly 15 countries Ports and 4 different regions realize "paperless delivery of goods". At the same time, as an important commercial document, electronic bills of lading can be converted into digital assets, thereby cutting into supply chain financial management in reverse, forming a closed loop.
Facts have proven that by grasping the underlying capabilities of technology, scenarios can be transcended and capabilities can be migrated.
04 Conclusion
At present, the wave of digitalization is sweeping every industry and every enterprise. For the vast majority of enterprises, it is not easy to cope with the challenges and uncertainties brought about by digital transformation alone. In terms of the times, the power of each enterprise may be "as small as an ant."
However, just as a cluster of tens of millions of ants can exert immense power through coordinated fighting, companies now also need to come together through digitalization to form a future-oriented industrial community. In this process, technology companies may be able to play the role of "worker ants". The new digital technologies they incubate are the links that link thousands of industries.
The digital "tentacles" that Ant has grown through years of experience are extending into wider areas. Every tentacle that grows now may grow into a new business tree in the future.
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