Source of article reprint: The trend of AI
Author丨Bai Jiajia
Editor丨Hickory
Artistic Editor丨Fisherman
Source: Silicon Research Laboratory
The ancients said that one knows destiny at fifty. This kind of "mysterious and mysterious" destiny has now hit 51-year-old Ding Lei and his NetEase.
As "a happy and slow rich man" in the Chinese Internet, Ding Lei and NetEase do not follow the trend and appear to be extremely Buddhist. Different from BAT's vigorous efforts to achieve miracles, NetEase has formed a set of methodology to slowly make money in the past years.
What many people don’t know is that from 2000 to 2020, there were only two companies in China with an annual return on capital exceeding 20%, one was Moutai and the other was NetEase.
To some extent, this impression of low-key money-making is being broken by AI big models. Not long ago, Ding Lei said that "exploring the innovation and application of AI big models at the fastest speed is NetEase's current top priority."
At the same time, NetEase is making frequent moves in the field of big models. NetEase Youdao has released the vertical big model "Zi Yue" in the field of education, and NetEase Fuxi's self-developed Yuyan, Fuxi, and industrial big models have all been launched.
For today's technology companies, the big model symbolizes an opportunity to change the company, industry or the world, which is undoubtedly a kind of destiny. But for the 51-year-old Ding Lei, what exactly did the big model awaken in him? And what will it bring to NetEase?
01. The first half of life driven by self-esteem
To understand NetEase’s various layouts in the field of large models, we need to go back to the first half of Ding Lei’s life.
As Ding Lei himself said, he only does things that he is interested in. Whether it was the early days of starting a business or the subsequent launch of Yixin and pig farming, this "interest-driven" approach ran through the first half of his life.
"Let's do something for the Internet together." In 1997, Ding Zhifeng, the founder of China's earliest IT studio dedicated to popularizing Internet knowledge, was moved by Ding Lei's words and agreed to work with Chuangsi and NetEase on free e-magazines without discussing any conditions. Chuangsi Magazine also became one of the e-magazines as famous as Soyi at that time.
Also moved was Zhang Jingjun, then director of the Guangzhou Telecom Data Branch.
One afternoon in May of the same year, Zhang Jingjun was flipping through a five- or six-page "Proposal for Enriching and Developing ChinaNet" in her hand. Ding Lei in front of her was talking eloquently about his search engine, PUSH, BBS and other technologies. Through these technologies, the problem of the lack of Chinese information on ChinaNet could be solved, and users could "go abroad" by surfing the Internet.
Ding Lei's enthusiasm and professionalism helped NetEase win the favor of Guangzhou Telecom, which provided Ding Lei with servers, network bandwidth directly connected to the backbone network, telephones, and offices.
In addition to the early days of entrepreneurship, two other things happened during the development of NetEase that made Ding Lei "interested".
One time was in 2009 when NetEase started raising pigs. At the time, many people treated it as a joke and criticized Ding Lei for putting on a show, but he was serious.
Ding Lei believes that it is a shame that China, as the world's largest pork producer and consumer, cannot produce top-notch pigs. In addition, he has another idea: if NetEase opens up the entire industrial chain and promotes it to all people engaged in pig farming, young and middle-aged people will no longer have to go to the city to make money, and the problems of left-behind children in rural areas and hollowing out can be alleviated.
Another time was the launch of YiXin in 2013.
At that time, WeChat had nearly 500 million users, making it the second national communication app after QQ. However, Ding Lei was dissatisfied with this product. In an interview, he emphasized that WeChat was a "unprogressive" software. At a private gathering, he even criticized a certain function of WeChat as an immoral design, like "a brothel downstairs of a five-star hotel."
From the outside, it seems that Ding Lei launched YiXin in order to compete with WeChat for the communications market. But when asked about the necessity of YiXin's existence, Ding Lei first denied the statement that YiXin would definitely be defeated by WeChat. Then he changed the subject and said that as long as YiXin exists, users will have the opportunity for fair choice, and Tencent must consider YiXin's movements when making every decision.
Whether it is raising pigs or competing with WeChat, these are things that NetEase is not good at and are also very difficult. However, Ding Lei's "interest" is actually driven by his strong sense of self-esteem. This strong sense of self-esteem makes him not afraid to devote himself to seemingly difficult things, hoping to change the industry or field through this.
In many detailed stories about Ding Lei, behind the labels of happy, Buddhist, and unhurried... the desire for respect is the hidden thread of these stories.
Financial writer Wu Xiaobo once commented that Ding Lei is "the only happy boss among the richest people." Reports about Ding Lei on the Internet usually like to use his iconic smile as the cover.
But that is not the case. In the coordinate system of the richest man, Ding Lei is the happiest one. But if Ding Lei himself were to judge, although his experience over the past 20 years has not left him with any regrets, it has also not brought him any labels that he is truly proud of.
For example, Ding Lei once publicly expressed his disdain for the title of "richest man". From 2003 to 2004, he was the richest man on the Forbes list, but he refused all interviews under the pretext of going abroad for vacation.
The first generation of Internet entrepreneur may be one of the few labels he is proud of. Several history books on the development of the Internet have used a lot of words to describe the origin of his entrepreneurship - he smashed his iron rice bowl with his own hands and was a "thorn" who was expelled from the Ningbo Telecommunications Bureau.
Many years later, Ding Lei still feels proud and excited about this "bravery back then": "This is the first time I fired myself. People will always face many opportunities in their lives, but opportunities come at a price. Whether or not you have the courage to take the first step is often a watershed in life."
This kind of courage to "fire oneself" is hard to find in the later development of NetEase. Today's NetEase is far from the three major portals of the past. Ding Lei tried to use Cloud Music and Youdao to shape the company into a more tasteful and responsible image, but NetEase is still regarded as a "game company", and some media even asked such questions: "What else does NetEase have besides games?"
As for the "Three Musketeers of the Internet" once regarded by the emerging Internet people, Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu returned to the physics class he loved, Wang Zhidong of Sina has long faded out of the Internet world, and only Ding Lei is still waiting for the next opportunity to change the world and gain self-esteem.
Finally, he waited for the big model that was said to "empower thousands of industries."
02. Ding Lei’s “Big Model View”
Before the big model really changed the world, various business stories had already appeared. In addition to BAT and Huawei, there are also a large number of entrepreneurs and academics. This prosperous scene of entrepreneurship is easy to remind people of the Internet era.
ChatGPT has indeed brought large AI models into the spotlight, adding fuel to the development of the industry.
Ding Lei certainly knows all this. In the past few years, both NetEase Youdao and Fuxi Studio, its subsidiary specializing in game and AI research and application, have been involved in the field of artificial intelligence. Ding Lei understands the progress of this industry. As an entrepreneur who has gone through the early days of the Internet, he can also foresee the amazing vitality behind the technological wave.
"This is a historic moment, and its significance may be no less than the second invention of fire by mankind," Ding Lei commented on the development of AI.
In Ding Lei's opinion, this fire first illuminated games and education.
"Ni Shui Han" is an example of NetEase combining AI technology with games. The features such as face-shaping and intelligent NPC are supported by the ability of Yu Yan, Yu Zhi, Dan Qing and other models to create pictures and texts.
Applying AI technology to games is not so much Ding Lei's wish as it is his fulfillment of his duties as the head of a game company. This is not enough to help him gain respect, especially respect for himself.
The "Zi Yue Big Model" brings six major functions to NetEase's terminal products, including LLM translation, virtual oral coach, and AI writing guidance.
Ding Lei naturally has a sense of mission for education, otherwise he would not have decided to donate 100 million yuan when he read "This Screen May Change Your Destiny" many years ago to support more schools to implement online education, so that "knowledge can flow without class constraints, and school district housing can be everywhere in China."
This "big model view" imbued with grand narratives and personal self-esteem further guided NetEase's layout in this field, even before ChatGPT ignited AI.
In November 2021, NetEase launched an excavation robot project to transfer the technical capabilities accumulated in the game to the physical excavator for adaptation. The reason why this project was born was because the game "Naraka: Bladepoint" launched a highly difficult human-machine battle robot through AI imitation learning. A year later, this world's first plateau excavation robot has been "plowing" in the unbearable cold wind of Litang.
At NetEase's booth at this year's WAIC conference, the "loader" jointly developed by NetEase Fuxi and China Construction Eighth Engineering Bureau was officially unveiled, which can realize multiple functions such as environmental perception and autonomous operation without human driving. In fact, as early as 2021, the Fuxi Research Laboratory established a robotics research department, and has begun to explore commercialization and open up ecosystems and upstream and downstream cooperation.
In addition to the "virtual to real" industrial route, Ding Lei and NetEase also combined AI with social welfare. For example, NetEase used its own technology to create the first AI tool to restore the original voice of the hearing-impaired, which is now open to the hearing-impaired nationwide for free.
Ding Lei's big model plan includes preservation, innovation, products covering mainstream values, and products integrated with the industry. It seems that Ding Lei has gradually found his original vigorous and resolute self on the Internet. While many of his peers are still looking for the gateway to the scene, he has quickly completed the layout and implementation of the big model.
Judging from the valuation performance, the market is full of expectations for the combination of NetEase and the big model. In the first half of this year, NetEase's highest rise was HK$176.3 per share, with the highest increase of more than 50% in the year. Its market value quietly surpassed JD.com and Baidu, and it has firmly taken the throne of the top 5 Internet giants after Tencent, Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and Meituan.
03. Can Ding Lei, who is not a Buddhist, change his fate by using the big model?
The ambitious Ding Lei is back, and NetEase’s layout in the field of large models is also extensive, but can he achieve the same success as at the beginning of the century?
The reality is that today's large-scale model competition is crowded with competitors, and each of them has strategic vision and execution capabilities that are no less than Ding Lei's.
Baidu, the first company to say "All in AI", has repeatedly stressed that AI is not about access, but about restructuring the original business. Baidu founder Robin Li has already given his own verdict on the current big model competition: "Big models are meaningless, and there are more application opportunities." Wenxin Yiyan, which has been opened to the whole society, has become a new toy for the national C-end.
Alibaba Cloud, led by Xiaoyaozi, became the first technology giant in China to open source a large model. After Tongyi Qianwen-7B was open sourced, Alibaba Cloud's large-scale visual language model Qwen-VL was directly announced as open source at the beginning of its launch.
Even Tencent, which always said "no rush", finally rushed to release its own general large model. Ma Huateng previously responded to how to view the "large model" at the shareholders' meeting, expressing a similar view to Ding Lei: "This is an opportunity that has not been seen for hundreds of years, similar to the industrial revolution that invented electricity."
In addition to the fierce competition, the big model also relies on the first-mover advantage. The snowball effect of the big model has shown that whoever forms the data flywheel first will be the first to enter exponential growth. The "plan before action" repeatedly advocated by Ding Lei in the past may become a fatal flaw today.
The education big model track is a typical example.
In terms of functions, although "Zi Yue" is known as the first big education model, whether it is the general big models of iFlytek and Baidu, or the big vertical education models on the market, they can come up with similar functions to compete with Zi Yue.
In terms of performance, with Wenxin Yiyan, Xinghuo, and Tongyi Qianwen being opened to the public, the data collection war among enterprises has entered a new stage. The capabilities of models represented by Chatbot will once again see a significant improvement, and the risk of NetEase falling behind will also increase.
In terms of ecological layout, iFLYTEK, which has already made some layout in the field of education, has formed a closed-loop ecology of "model + application + ecology". Although NetEase Big Model has achievements and cases in the field of education, it is still slightly weak in comparison.
Finally, NetEase also has limitations in the breadth of scenarios.
Because of the "illusion" of large models, there is a misalignment between buyers and users. Learning performance, which can be used as a criterion for evaluation, is interfered with by many factors. The reputation of large model products for learning is therefore uncertain. In the current competition, channel advantages still outweigh technical advantages.
Therefore, DingTalk, which took advantage of the epidemic to enter the education market, and iFlytek, which already had many B-end and G-end users, have both developed a complete AI system suitable for campus scenarios.
In this dimension, NetEase, which lacks B-side experience, obviously finds it difficult to compete with the first two.
In the To B field, NetEase has launched four major TOB brands, namely NetEase Zhiqi, NetEase Shufan, NetEase Lingxi and NetEase Fuxi, since 2015, which are respectively dedicated to enterprise services, big data business, collaborative office, and AI applications and research. However, in the past eight years, unlike other large companies with clear strategies in the 2B field, NetEase's cross-product concept and vague positioning strategy have made it only the "second echelon" in the To B war of large companies.
To some extent, Ding Lei's forays into the field of large models can actually be seen as a "battle to restore his reputation" for NetEase.
Let’s go back to the day when Ding Lei and Zhou Zhuolin founded NetEase. Ding Lei said that the new company wanted to do Internet business, so it must have the word “Net” in its name. Zhou Zhuolin believed that the new company wanted to make it easier for netizens to access the Internet, so it must have the word “Easy” in its name.
The wishes of the two people came together to create NetEase. The name NetEase represents the spirit of that era. Today, the Internet has become popular in every household, and the name has gradually become just a "historical significance."
For Ding Lei and NetEase, who are no longer Buddhist, how to find their position again in the new technology wave, some legacy issues still need to be resolved. As Ding Lei himself said: "When fire appears, some people are afraid of being burned by it, while others will use it to create everything. Policymakers, especially our own companies, must clearly understand this principle."
Whether to be burned or to create everything, for Ding Lei and his NetEase, there is not much time left to answer this question.
References:
1. Industrialist: NetEase has been silent for eight years in TO B
2. Character: Ding Lei's fatalism
3. 36Kr: NetEase Fuxi Robot: The first unmanned excavator landed on a 4,000-meter plateau, accelerating the innovation of traditional productivity
4. "Fifteen Years of Boiling: China's Internet (1995-2009)"