Hou Yang stated that Microsoft firmly believes that any company in the future will need to have the ability to harness digital technology. Microsoft will use AI to drive the intelligent transformation of six key industries, including manufacturing and energy.
On July 6, 2023, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WOpenAIC), abbreviated as WOpenAIC, opened in Shanghai. At the opening ceremony, Hou Yang, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Global and Chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China, stated that "every company will need the ability to harness digital technology in the future, and every application of each company will be driven by artificial intelligence."
Hou Yang pointed out that the technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are bringing unprecedented opportunities and challenges to various industries. This also prompts the industry to consider how to use it to enhance their own creativity and competitiveness.
Hou Yang stated that while achieving technological breakthroughs, Microsoft is considering how to transform research results into productivity. They hope to combine generative artificial intelligence with professional needs as soon as possible to accelerate industry upgrading and innovation.
Based on recent global customer solutions for industrial intelligence, Hou Yang stated that Microsoft has summarized six key innovative scenarios for applying artificial intelligence in various industries, including manufacturing and energy, retail and e-commerce, digital native games, finance and insurance, life sciences, and education and talent training:
- In the manufacturing and energy sector, it can be applied from the perspectives of production material knowledge base management, product quality analysis and traceability, full-scenario simulation training for autonomous driving, and virtual car assistants.
- For example, we can revolutionize intelligent customer service in retail and e-commerce, enabling interactive searches and guiding consumer trends.
- We can also create lifelike NPC characters and generate infinite plots and realistic dialogues in games.
- In the financial industry, we can obtain analysis reports on market implementation trends in real-time, enabling earlier detection and faster control of potential financial transaction risks.
- In the field of life science research, we can enhance the analysis capabilities of clinical trial data, accelerate the research of drugs and vaccines, and achieve more accurate medical image recognition and diagnosis.
- In the education field, we can bring students a more inspiring, interactive, customized, and geographically unrestricted exploratory learning experience. We can help cultivate talents with creativity and lifelong learning abilities that are more suitable for future market demands.
In conclusion, Hou Yang also expressed concerns about the security risks brought about by the development of OpenAI. In response, he stated that Microsoft will build responsible artificial intelligence, adhering to fairness, reliability, safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
Below is the full text of Hou Yang's speech:
The theme of this year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference is "Intelligent Connectivity, Shaping the Future." I would like to take this opportunity to share with you Microsoft's ecological innovation in expanding generative artificial intelligence and the experiences and reflections gained in accelerating the advancement of industrial intelligence connectivity.
Artificial intelligence as a research project first appeared in 1956 and has now been developed for nearly 70 years. With the overnight popularity of OpenOpenAI at the end of last year, large models and generative artificial intelligence seemed to explode in an instant. Even many practitioners in the technology industry were amazed by the sudden emergence of OpenOpenAI.
In fact, in Microsoft's view, this so-called emergence is by no means accidental. Countless outstanding researchers have been dedicated to research for decades, and the investment of massive computing resources has created such innovative achievements.
Perhaps you all know that the breakthrough of OpenOpenAI relies on the infrastructure and computing power support provided by Microsoft Intelligent Cloud. Since 2019, Microsoft has been deeply cooperating with OpenOpenAI to support the research of OpenOpenAI's large language models with massive cloud computing resources. The basis of the strategic cooperation between the two parties lies in the sincere hope of both companies to create artificial intelligence technology that benefits every enterprise and every consumer.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of this year, Mr. Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, mentioned that the golden age of artificial intelligence has arrived, and Microsoft Intelligent Cloud has thus embarked on a new mode of accelerated innovation.
We integrate the latest OpenAI intelligent technology with enterprise-level cloud services to empower enterprises to achieve true digital intelligence integration in the process of industrial digital transformation. Our Azure OpenOpenAI Enterprise Edition service has launched five models, including GPT 4 and enterprise-level OpenOpenAI, to support customers in creating customized intelligent services for different industries.
At the same time, around Microsoft 365 Office, Dynamics 365 business applications, GitHub open source community development, digital information security protection, employee experience enhancement, and the familiar Windows operating system, Microsoft has also launched a series of Copilot intelligent co-pilot services driven by OpenAI. Users can express their needs in natural language, and Copilot can efficiently complete a series of tasks for users, such as quickly writing code, developing an application, or designing a set of graphic and text-rich PPT presentations based on the outline of a speech.
The scenarios I just mentioned are no longer fictional today. They are real work scenarios that many enterprises, including Microsoft, have already practiced. For example, since the launch of the highly anticipated OpenOpenAI Enterprise Edition a few months ago, it has been approved by over 4,500 enterprises worldwide and has been used in production environments in various industries such as manufacturing, retail, finance, and services. Already practicing innovation in intelligence.
For example, GitHub Copilot, which is used for assisted programming, has been used by over one million developers worldwide since its launch a year and a half ago. Nearly half of their code has been completed with the help of Copilot, resulting in an increase in programming speed of over 50%.
In these positive attempts by global customers to use Microsoft's AI services, we not only see the enthusiasm of enterprises accelerating digital transformation, but also feel the urgent market demand for the new generation of generative AI. Therefore, Microsoft continues to increase investment and fully promote the development and popularization of generative AI. At the Microsoft Global Developer Conference held in May this year, Microsoft released more than 50 new technologies and services related to generative AI development.
One of the most important is that we have opened up the Copilot intelligent co-pilot and plugins extension system to developers worldwide, allowing developers, partners, and enterprise users from all over the world to seize the innovative opportunities brought by generative AI and create a new generation of intelligent applications like never before.
The intelligent plugins extension system adopts the same technical standards as OpenAI. It can establish a secure and reliable connection between third-party applications, customers, business scenarios, and generative AI. By accessing real-time updated information streams and various applications and services through plugins, it can add more professional computing capabilities to the OpenAI system, creating a more diverse, convenient, and accurate intelligent co-pilot dialogue service.
It is expected that when Microsoft 365 Copilot is officially released, we will provide more than 1,000 plugins for developers to choose from. What is even more exciting is that developers and partners worldwide will have the ability to independently use these plugin interfaces and intelligent services to develop more diverse and unique innovative applications for intelligent co-piloting.
Undoubtedly, these are the new generation of intelligent interactive applications based on natural language dialogue, which will open up a more exciting digital world for us.
Microsoft firmly believes that in the future, every company will need the ability to master digital technology. We also see that with the continuous demonstration of the enormous potential of generative AI, every application of every company will be driven by artificial intelligence in the future. The technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are also bringing unprecedented opportunities and challenges to various industries, which prompts us to think about how to use it to enhance the creativity and competitiveness of enterprises.
While achieving technological breakthroughs, Microsoft is also considering how to transform research results into productivity. We hope to combine generative artificial intelligence with the needs of industries as soon as possible, accelerating industry upgrades and innovation. What I am presenting here are six key innovative scenarios for applying artificial intelligence in industries, summarized based on recent global customer solutions for industrial intelligence.
For example, we can revolutionize intelligent customer service in retail e-commerce, enabling interactive searches and guiding consumer trends.
We can also create lifelike NPC characters in games, generating infinite plots and realistic dialogues.
In the financial industry, we can obtain real-time analysis reports on market trends, enabling earlier detection and faster control of potential financial transaction risks.
In the field of life science research, we can enhance the analysis capabilities of clinical trial data, accelerate the research of drugs and vaccines, and achieve more accurate medical image recognition and diagnosis. In the education sector, we can bring students a more inspiring, interactive, customized, and geographically unrestricted exploratory learning approach. We can help cultivate talents that are more creative and have lifelong learning abilities, better suited to future market demands.
With the continuous integration of generative artificial intelligence into industries, we believe that in the coming months, there will be a constant emergence of diverse and imaginative application scenarios.
In the process of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence, concerns about potential security risks are inevitable. Microsoft has always advocated and strictly adhered to the six principles of responsible artificial intelligence, and we have always complied with the requirements related to data privacy and security compliance. At the same time, we actively promote global technological companies to form industry consensus through communication and cooperation, ensuring that the artificial intelligence technology we develop can responsibly benefit all of humanity.
Faced with the tremendous opportunities brought by a new round of technological changes, Microsoft is willing to start from our own technology and advantageous resources in China, deeply cultivate the local ecosystem, and continue to expand technical exchanges and business cooperation with enterprises and partners in various industries across the country. We will actively explore the potential applications of digital intelligence in various industries, truly promote intelligent innovation and digital transformation in all sectors, and contribute our most positive efforts.
