At the first installment of the 2024 Ideal AI Talk on December 25thIdeal Auto CEO Li Xiang (1907-1989), Chinese communist leader, prime minister of the Republic of China after the cultural revolutionConversing on topics such as AI, he said a realLarge ModelThe product, which must be able to go and use all the devices autonomously, will have all the services, which is the real artificial intelligence.
1AI Attachment Ideal AI Talk Interview Transcript Some of the highlights are below:
Q: The first time you said internally that you wanted to be a leading global AI company was in January last year, two months after ChatGPT was born, were you following the trend?
- A:It's not a follow-through. In September 2022, we've identified that we're going to make AI a really important one, and we think it's going to be the key to competing in the future.
- When we released our strategy (vision) at the beginning of 2023, we made a fundamental change thatTurning AI from a hidden strategy to an open and masculine oneBecause of this we can attract enough talent.
Q: So you do think it's a bigger story, it's a bigger dream to call it an AI business?
- A:I don't think it's the bigger story, if you see what we're actually doing, you'll believe it, we're investing over $10 billion a year in R&D, and close to half of that is invested in AI.
- We are doing our own base model, end-to-end and VLM (Vision Language Model), from the very beginning of the paper to the research of the technology, to the final R&D and the delivery of the product, and also very early in the world to do it, and we are not only doing the smart driving, we also have Ideal Classmates, Smart Business, and Smart Industry, and that's really what we are doing.
- The biggest feeling I had when the big models came along was that humanity would fundamentally change.
Q: Ideal student used to be a personal assistant for car, but now it is going to enter the cell phone and become an App, and it will be on more terminals in the future, which means that you, as an EV enterprise, are going to enter the red sea battle of universal personal assistant, is that so?
- A:If we were a pure hardware company, it would fit that definition you just mentioned, but just like Apple is not a company that just sells Macs, and that's why it has the possibilities that come after it, these companies today can't be defined by a piece of hardware.
- The reason we go to a lot of hardware, in fact, many times, is to better control the hardware system, as well as performance a little bit higher, but large software is different, not everyone can do the operating system, not everyone can do large cloud services, this becomes a bigger challenge.
- Back to AI as well, today you can see hundreds of EV companies because China has a very well-developed supply chain, but out of these hundreds of companies, which ones will be able to go to the base model in the future?
Is it a strategic decision for Ideal Students to move from car phones into cell phones, or are you guys just trying to give it a shot?
- A:I don't think it's that complicated, it's still twofold. In the long run, under the premise of mastering the base model, a really big model product must be able to go and use all the devices autonomously, and will have all the services, which is the real artificial intelligence.
- In terms of user demand, many children of ideal users, the first contact with artificial intelligence products is ideal classmates, in the process of dialog with ideal classmates, to help them solve some problems, such as using ideal classmates to draw, or chat with ideal classmates about their homework ...... We hope to be able to make the more than 1 million users of the Ideal Car, and then We hope to make it possible for the more than 1 million users of Ideal Car, plus the families of these users, about 3-5 million people, to use Ideal Car not only on their cars, but also on their cell phones, computers, and even on their glasses in the back.All experience consistent AI offerings, I think that's what we have to do.
Q: A lot of people say you're a super product manager, can you speak from a product perspective, as AI's capabilities evolve, what kind of iteration will happen to its product form?
- A:I think one of the important things about making a product is to combine the user's needs with all of your capabilities.
- Artificial Intelligence AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) is realized to its final stage, which I often describe in three ways. The first stage, called"Empower me."The first stage of autonomous driving is the first stage of autonomous driving, which means that it is actually an auxiliary for me, but the final decision-making power is in me. Including L3 autopilot, we call it supervised autopilot, in fact, I still need to supervise in the car, and the final tout, the core reason is that the first stage of the ability is not enough, the responsible one is me, so it is called to enhance my ability, but it will really make me very convenient, and make my efficiency become very high.
- By the second stage, a stage described by the intelligentsia, which I call the"Be my assistant."I can send it a task, or even successive tasks, and it can do it independently and take responsibility for the results. For example, I can talk to an L4 car, you go to pick up my child, I do not need to sit in the car, it can go to the school to pick up my child, and facial recognition to open the door for the child to get on the car. The good thing about this stage is that it will become a large-scale application, a real iPhone 4 stage. For automotive companies, only when they realize L4 will it be the real iPhone 4 stage, but not yet today.
- The third stage is the ultimate stage of AGI I think, because the mission of Ideal Vehicle is "to create a mobile home, to create a happy home", so I call it"Silicon-based family.", that is, I don't need to give it any more instructions, I don't need to assign it tasks, it's a member of our family, even an important organizer of the family, it not only knows me, it knows my children, it knows my friends around me, even more than I do.
- It will take the initiative to do a lot of things, can measure autonomously, and help me manage the family well. When the AGI reaches the third stage and is my silicon-based family member, I think it is very important to say that my memories will also be kept alive by it, and maybe my physical body will no longer exist, but my memories will become part of it.
- One of the things I'm most excited about for myself is that I think my team and I will be able to realize the third stage in our lifetimes.
Q: If resources are limited and you have to choose between your ideal classmate and smart driving, which one do you give up?
- A:I'll cut the others, not these two.