Shen Xiangyang, Chairman Of Xiaobing Company: C-End Will Be A Huge Long-Term Market For AI Commercialization

As Xiaobing's "mother's family", Wang Yongdong, senior vice president of Microsoft and President of Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute, said he was in a complex mood when talking about Xiaobing's "flying alone".

"Some people say that Xiaobing graduated from Microsoft, and now she is going out to explore the world." Recently, in an interview with the media including the 21st century economic report, Wang Yongdong said here, one sentence at a time, "I think it's a feeling of marrying a daughter, which has cultivated her and loves her very much. But when she grows up, she also wants to go out and have her own life."

On July 13 this year, Microsoft announced that it would split the AI Xiaobing business into an independent company, and appointed Shen Xiangyang, the former global executive vice president of Microsoft and former president of Microsoft Asia Research Institute, as the chairman of the new company. Li Di, the father of Xiaobing, was the CEO, and Chen Zhan was the general manager of Japan branch.

From the establishment of the project in Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute at the end of 2013 to the official launch of the first generation product in May 2014, Xiaobing, which has grown for seven years, has grown from "baby" to "ignorant girl" step by step, and then to "grown up" and truly independent. Just last week, the eighth generation of Xiaobing was officially launched. At the press conference, Xiaobing launched the first virtual human product line for individual users, the "x suite" series of application software and a series of related business cooperation and plans.

How has Xiaobing changed since independence? How do you expect your future? "Microsoft divested the past Xiaobing business and established Xiaobing independent company, hoping to make more efforts in the R & D and marketization of domestic product lines in Japan and China. The starting point is very simple." Shen Xiangyang pointed out that Xiaobing, who is divorced from Microsoft's "mother's home", is now more of an entrepreneur's mentality. "It's not easy to start a business after a new company is established, and it's OK and cherish it."

Xiao Bing's "ambition"

Xiaobing always has a special temperament, which may explain why Xiaobing is popular all over the world. At present, its interaction volume accounts for more than 60% of the global total interaction.

"I think Xiaobing is very interesting," many users of Xiaobing told the 21st century economic report. "Ai assistants of other Internet companies are more like secretaries or assistants. Xiaobing is really talking to you and playing with you."

Now, the eighth generation of Xiaobing has officially launched its first virtual human product line. Users can create and train their own unique AI subjects through Xiaobing framework. In the previous testing phase, the product line has created more than 1 million virtual humans in response to user demand.

"I registered a virtual boyfriend for the first time," a user told reporters. Her "boyfriend" was an Aquarius, 26 year old "workaholic." the registration process is very simple, as long as you can "claim" through Xiaobing. After answering a few questions, Xiaobing will generate a virtual boyfriend for me. When my "boyfriend" says hello to me, it's amazing

It should be noted that this is different from the "electronic pet" in the user's memory. It is more like a science fiction scene for the future. The virtual human derived from Xiaobing can achieve cross platform unification and has the ability of multi person interaction. This means that virtual humans can not only talk to their "masters", but also other users and even other virtual humans.

"A virtual human society similar to the western world may be born in the future," commented an observer who pays close attention to Xiaobing. "Such a virtual AI society is connected with the real society, but it has its own behavioral development logic. Xiaobing's move is likely to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence. "

In fact, it is not the ability to solve other problems from the very beginning. Under such characteristics, although the AI industry has experienced impetuosity and reflection in the past few years, Xiaobing's intergenerational change has always followed its own rhythm.

After the first generation of Xiaobing rapidly accumulated training data in the form of conversational chat robot, the second generation of Xiaobing completed the interactive architecture of cross platform deployment, and the third generation of Xiaobing expanded the interaction from text to multimodality, and further accumulated multimodal training data. It is reported that since the fourth generation of small ice, the total amount of small ice interaction has been ranked first in the world and has remained so far.

Since then, Xiaobing is still expanding its "antennae". Huawei's mobile phone has become the only platform of its own, such as xiaomipo, duvial, etc., which has been expanded to the fifth major platform in China. The sixth generation of Xiaobing completed the goal of framework iteration, and launched various framework tools from the seventh generation to help create third-party AI products and carry interaction.

Iteration to the eighth generation, interaction is still the key word of Xiaobing. "In the past, I have always mentioned in my speeches that people who understand the language will win the world, which must be a very important direction," Shen explained. "But the opportunity space we see is actually interaction. In the future, no matter what kind of subject artificial intelligence presents, it must have interactive ability. In this regard, Xiaobing's lead is not only a little bit, but there will be more opportunities and scenes

Optimistic about the C-end Market

Can sing, write poetry, paint While the all-round "talented woman" Xiaobing's skill points continue to increase, from the seventh generation, Xiaobing's commercialization rhythm is also accelerating.

In the past year, Xiaobing's business team has broken through RMB 100 million.

"Before, there were not too many requirements for Xiaobing's commercialization within Microsoft. These revenues are equivalent to natural growth revenue." A person close to Xiaobing told the 21st century economic reporter. The reporter learned that Xiaobing did not have a formal sales team in the past, but relevant personnel are making up after independence, "from this perspective, Xiaobing's future income should have more sufficient imagination space."

Li Di told the 21st century economic report that in the past year, Xiaobing's main sources of income came from vertical industries such as finance, automobile and content industry.

It is understood that Xiaobing's commercial cooperation in the automotive field is not only at the body design level, but also involves the intelligent assistant module in the car. In terms of intelligent assistant, Xiaobing is characterized by the integrity of the framework, including voice interaction, natural language processing, and content output. This also makes Xiaobing different from the "voice command" type in car assistant of other players in the same industry.

In addition, in the content industry that Xiaobing has always been good at, Xiaobing's income is also increasing. Li Di pointed out that the expansion of production in traditional content industry means the corresponding increase of cost, but the entry of artificial intelligence means efficient production under a single cost. At present, Xiaobing has formed a relatively mature production line in the content industry.

It should be noted that, unlike other AI process layout, Xiaobing is more focused on solving key problems. "We split a lot of capabilities into solutions in different fields, but even in the vertical field, we tend to do key jobs and really be able to replace the original solutions," Li Di pointed out. "Our advantage is that we can do it very deeply and rewrite the original rules. For example, in the field of financial risk control, we need to form a massive knowledge map and expand it We have a lot of accumulation on the domain. "

However, this is far from the goal and end point of Xiaobing's commercialization. "In the long run, we feel that to C is a huge market," Shen stressed. In fact, this generation of small ice launched a virtual human for individuals, also pointed to the long-term C-end market. "In the future, the number of AI agents will far exceed the number of human beings, and the future business model will also be based on the number of AI population."

However, the premise of C-end market is that users really approve of artificial intelligence. From this point of view, Xiaobing has been in the forefront. "Once you have a large population, the rest of the commercialization problem is very simple. All along, our whole team has been relatively restrained in commercialization. " Shen Xiangyang said.