Tech PlanetexclusiveLearned,PinduoduoA group of dozens of people has been establishedLarge ModelThe team is located in Shanghai. The big model team will explore the application of big models in Pinduoduo customer service, dialogue and other scenarios, and will expand to its cross-border e-commerce platform TEMU intelligent customer service, search, recommendation and other business scenarios. At present, the whole process is still in the research and development stage.
Industry analysts believe that Pinduoduo's big model will serve its e-commerce system, including applications in AI shopping guides and intelligent generation of product images.
Tech Planet found that Pinduoduo has started recruiting talents in the field of large models through its official website and other recruitment channels. Many large model positions offer annual salaries of millions.HighestNearly 1.3 million yuan.
Caption: Screenshots of recruitment for large model-related positions on Pinduoduo’s official website and BOSS Direct Recruitment.
In this regard, Tech Planet sought confirmation from Pinduoduo. As of press time, Pinduoduo has not responded.
At the beginning of this year, there was a big model craze in China, especially among Internet giants, such as Alibaba's "Tongyi Qianwen", Baidu's "Wenxin", Tencent's "Hunyuan Assistant", Huawei's "Pangu", Kuaishou's "Kuaiyi" and other big model products. Recently, Meituan's big model has also passed the filing, and Didi was exposed to be forming a big model team to test some personal travel and corporate travel scenarios. With Pinduoduo's formation of a big model team, the leading Internet giants in China have all entered the market and started the research and development competition for big models.
There is no doubt that big models are becoming the key and consensus for Internet giants to explore future businesses and reshape their own businesses. With the support of big models, each business will also participate in industry competition with a new attitude. Who will have the last laugh?
Pinduoduo lays out a large model to focus on its main e-commerce business
In fact, Pinduoduo is an e-commerce platform with AI genes. Before forming a large model team, Pinduoduo had already conducted research on AI in the e-commerce field, and the top management also had a positive view on AI.
Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng and chairman and CEO Chen Lei both have experience working in AI. In his early years, Huang Zheng has been working in AI from college to working at Google. Huang Zheng once revealed in an interview with Caijing magazine that the future development direction of the platform is to replace manual product selection with machines and algorithms, and to minimize manual intervention in the rules.
In June 2018, Chen Lei also talked about the role and improvement of AI in Pinduoduo's business in an interview with Yiou.
Chen Lei believes that Pinduoduo's opportunity lies in the fact that AI can work more beautifully in user habit analysis and product matching - the large user base, high-frequency transactions and shopping behaviors have added richer social dimensions, and are building an increasingly smarter database, which can not only provide the basic data volume for AI calculations, but also the images, voice and semantic understanding shown in human communication, which can make AI learning more accurate and reduce the consumption of computing resources.
"Price/performance ratio is the core issue in the retail industry, and AI will bring us surprises," said Chen Lei.
Pinduoduo's official website also specifically listed relevant data. As of September 2018, Pinduoduo's technical team had more than 1,700 engineers, with more than 200 people focusing on algorithm design and development. In 2019, Pinduoduo's algorithm team further expanded. Pinduoduo used a technology internally called "distributed AI" to study the possible consumer needs of individuals and achieve "goods find people."
Today, with the technological upgrading of AI, it has become a general trend in the Internet industry to shift to the research and development of large models to better serve the development of the main business.
Sources revealed to Tech Planet that Pinduoduo's big model team is responsible for the training of Pinduoduo's large-scale language model and its application in business scenarios (dialogue, understanding, and decision-making). Specifically, it will be applied to Pinduoduo's customer service, dialogue and other scenarios, and will be expanded to its cross-border e-commerce platform TEMU in intelligent customer service, search, recommendation and other business scenarios. Through the big model, Pinduoduo may be able to create a new AI e-commerce system.
An e-commerce industry expert told Tech Planet that big models are more complex than traditional AI, but they will also bring better results to e-commerce. Applying big models to Pinduoduo's e-commerce business can not only more intelligently recommend products suitable for users, improve shopping experience and sales conversion rate, but also realize more intelligent virtual customer service. This can provide 24-hour online customer service support, solve user problems, and improve user satisfaction.
In addition, AI can also help e-commerce platforms with supply chain management, inventory forecasting, and sales forecasting through predictive analysis and data mining, thereby improving operational efficiency and management level. Finally, AI can also provide a more realistic and immersive shopping experience through image recognition and virtual reality technology, attracting users and improving purchasing decisions, which can bring huge potential and value to Pinduoduo.
In fact, large model products play an increasingly important role in e-commerce transactions. In the past year, many e-commerce platforms have explored large model products, and AI e-commerce has become a key layout direction.
For example, Baidu e-commerce has launched the AI shopping guide service "Smart Shopping Guide", and Douyin's Yuntu Express version allows merchants to generate short video materials with one click through AIGC (artificial intelligence generated content). Taobao has already internally tested the AI shopping guide function "Taobao Ask" and AI creation assistant.
The person in charge of Taobao's Tmall merchant platform revealed that Taobao is actively opening up its entire AI system architecture to the outside world. Since its opening in May this year, more than 1,000 companies have joined or are applying to join, jointly building Taobao's customer service reception, product main image generation, product details generation, and video generation capabilities.
Of course, each company’s AI e-commerce is still in its early stages and has not yet been applied on a large scale. For Pinduoduo, it is still in the window period.
According to Goldman Sachs' forecast, AI will save the retail industry $54 billion in costs and create $41 billion in new revenue each year by 2025. Therefore, Pinduoduo and other e-commerce platforms may become more aggressive in the development and application of large models in order to take the lead in this new wave of AI e-commerce.
Big companies are rushing to make it again with big models
Not only Pinduoduo, the big model has been elevated to a strategic business by major Internet companies. The big model can not only reshape mature businesses and innovations, but also drive performance growth.
In April this year, Zhang Yong, then chairman of the board and CEO of Alibaba Group, said at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit that all industries deserve to be redone with the big model, and announced that all Alibaba products will be connected to the "Tongyi Qianwen" big model in the future for a comprehensive transformation. On September 12, Wu Yongming, the new CEO of Alibaba Group, issued a letter to all employees, establishing the two strategic focuses of "user first, AI-driven", and reshaping the business strategy priorities accordingly.
According to statistics compiled by Tech Planet, Tmall, DingTalk, AutoNavi Maps, Taobao, Xianyu, Ele.me, Youku, Hema, and Taopiaopiao have been connected to Tongyi Qianwen. With the access to the big model, AI-enabled businesses have brought new gameplay and data improvements to users. Taking Taobao as an example, the big model native AI application Taobao Wenwen has been experienced by more than 5 million people since its internal testing in September. Among them, the average number of questions asked by highly active people per day exceeded 8 times, and the maximum number of questions asked by a single user exceeded 4,000 times.
In addition to Tongyi Qianwen, other Alibaba platforms are developing their own large models. For example, Alibaba Intelligent Information Group recently released a full-stack self-developed, 100 billion-level parameter Quark large model, which will be applied to general search, medical health, education and learning, workplace office and many other scenarios. Ant Group's technical R&D team has developed its own language and multimodal model, a large model developed under the name of "Zhenyi".
Not only Alibaba, but the other two companies in the BAT camp are also making frequent moves.
Tencent's self-developed Hunyuan big model has been connected to more than 180 internal business tests. The big model has brought significant improvements to some of Tencent's businesses.up to dateThe financial report shows that Tencent's advertising revenue in the third quarter increased by 20% year-on-year to 25.7 billion yuan, setting a record high. Ma Huateng, Chairman and CEO of Tencent, said, "We are increasing our investment in artificial intelligence models to give our products new features and enhance our ability to accurately recommend content and advertisements. We are committed not only to positioning leading artificial intelligence capabilities as a multiplier for our own business development, but also to creating value for our corporate customers and even the entire society."
Baidu is no exception. In May this year, Baidu CEO Robin Li claimed that "the big model will change the world" and "Baidu will redo all its products with the big model." From the main business search to Baidu Wenku, cloud disk, maps and other Baidu applications, they have all been connected to the Wenxin big model. For example, Baidu Wenku, after using AI native reconstruction, can generate a 20-page PPT in 1 minute, including chart generation, format beautification, etc., at almost zero cost. This not only realizes the transformation from content tools to productivity tools, but also increases the payment rate of Wenku.
ByteDance directly integrated the big model into its business. Tech Planet learned that ByteDance's Skylark big model has been integrated into websites or apps such as Douyin, Toutiao, Jianying, Fanqie Novels, Xigua Video, Feishu, Doubao, Wukong Browser, and Dongchedi, many of which are core businesses.
Caption: Screenshot from the model algorithm mechanism description of the Skylark model.
After Kuaishou released the Kuaiyi big model, it was quickly applied to the main APP and launched the "Kuaishou AI Dialogue" function based on the big model in the main APP. This is a breakthrough in the short video live broadcast industry.The firstThe intelligent question-and-answer product based on the large language model allows users to intelligently answer questions and create texts. Just as Kuaishou recently released its 2023 third quarter financial report, it alsofirstThe use of AI virtual anchor "Guan Xiaofang" in financial report broadcasting highlights the importance of AI to Kuaishou.
In addition, Meituan and Didi are also developing big models. Although no specific application products have been launched yet, the rapid development of big models will enhance the competitiveness of their respective main businesses.
As various players are rushing into the big model market, the competition around big models is becoming more intense. From talent poaching to technology iteration, the competition is intensifying. It is time to compete with internal strength, especially the businesses that have been reshaped by big models, which will also be put into the competition with a new attitude. The big model war among the top Internet players has already begun.