Will China's manufacturing industry enter a stage of development from quantity to quality due to the injection of new-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence?

"Artificial intelligence was born more than 60 years ago. With the breakthrough of algorithms, the improvement of computing power, and the accumulation of data, it has finally ushered in the third wave", Song Xianzhu, Vice President of China Electronics and Information Industry Development Research Institute Said that one of the biggest features of this round of artificial intelligence development is the close integration with application practice.

Following the wave of technology, Chinese officials continue to make efforts. In July 2017, the State Council issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan", and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology subsequently formulated the "Three-Year Action Plan for Promoting the Development of the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018-2020)." This week, the seventh meeting of the Central Committee for Comprehensively Deepening Reform reviewed and approved the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Deep Integration of Artificial Intelligence and the Real Economy".

Officials propose to carry out pilot demonstrations of artificial intelligence applications in key industries and fields such as manufacturing, agriculture, logistics, finance, commerce, and home furnishing.

"China's manufacturing industry ranks first in the world, and it is the only country in the world that has all the manufacturing catalogs of the United Nations, but most of China's manufacturing is in the stage of Industry 1.0 (mechanization) and Industry 2.0 (electrification)", Yang Xueshan, a professor at Peking University and former deputy minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, estimates that less than 10% of manufacturing companies have reached Industry 3.0 (automation). Therefore, artificial intelligence is very promising in the process of manufacturing in China moving towards Industry 4.0 (smart).

At present, technologies such as visual recognition, face recognition, speech recognition, and deep learning have been applied to manufacturing. So what changes can artificial intelligence bring to manufacturing?

Zheng Yelai, vice president of Huawei, said that industrial AI applications can improve productivity and optimize production relations. They are mainly used in three scenarios: massive repetitive scenarios, expert experience scenarios, and multi-domain collaboration scenarios.

For example, flexible manufacturing is a multi-domain collaborative scenario and one of the future development trends of the manufacturing industry. If you want to achieve flexible manufacturing, that is, personalized customization, you need to face the problems of ultra-high-dimensional data, ultra-large data, mutual interference between parameters, and high computational complexity. The digital transformation project that Huawei cooperated with synthetic fiber company Sanlian Hope uses artificial intelligence to solve the above problems.

Sun Pishu, Chairman and CEO of Inspur Group, believes that to expand "intelligence" is to add the wings of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry. The production process, internal management and data in the consumer market are moved and used to form intelligent decision-making and command, realize intelligent management and operation and business process automation, and promote the transformation and development of enterprises to high-end, personalized, customized and comprehensive service.

According to a McKinsey survey, 30% of companies that use AI on a large scale or adopt AI in their core businesses say they have achieved revenue growth or improved product and service capabilities.

According to Wu Hequan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in the statistics of the growth rate brought by AI to various industries in China in 2015, the manufacturing industry ranked first, but at present, 23.4% of China's artificial intelligence investment is concentrated in the commercial and retail fields, and 18.3% In autonomous driving, less than 1% in manufacturing. This is mainly because the data collection process in the manufacturing industry is longer, the reliability of the data is more challenging, and it is more difficult to test the results of the manufacturing industry.

Cai Yinghua, President of Huawei's Enterprise Business China, believes that the implementation of artificial intelligence should first be integrated with industries and scenarios, and second, there must be a talent pool that can promote AI. At present, Huawei has begun to implement a talent training plan with an investment of 1 billion yuan.

The digitalization of enterprises is the premise of intelligence. At present, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has set a goal to promote more than 300,000 industrial enterprises to go to the cloud by the end of 2020.

Lu Ping, an associate researcher at the China Electronics and Information Industry Development Research Institute, said that to accelerate the implementation of artificial intelligence, a complete industrial system should be gradually established, customized AI chips should be developed around specific application scenarios, and the problems of data silos and data fragmentation should also be solved.