Artificial intelligence wants to become "smart" need to upgrade computing power

The latest report on ARTIFICIAL intelligence, the 2020-2021 Assessment Report on the Development of China‘s ARTIFICIAL intelligence computing power, has been released.The report predicts that China will account for 15.6 percent of the global AI market by 2024, becoming an important driver and backbone of the growth of the global AI industry.

The report, jointly released by international data research firm IDC and Inspur Group, is the third consecutive year that a series of reports on the computing power of ARTIFICIAL intelligence has been released since 2018.

The report predicts that with the rapid development of AI algorithms, the size of China‘s AI market will reach about $6.27 billion in 2020, maintain a compound annual growth rate of 30.4% in the next four years, and reach a market size of $17.22 billion in 2024.Although the overall ai market size growth rate in China is not as fast as IDC predicted last year due to the COVID-19 epidemic, it will still be higher than the average growth rate of 20.1% in the forecast period of the global AI market.

However, the report also highlighted once again a common need and challenge in the development of ARTIFICIAL intelligence -- computing power, which is the decisive factor for future breakthroughs in artificial intelligence applications.

Specifically, the lack of data required for model training, the insufficient computing power infrastructure, and the excessively high cost of artificial intelligence application solutions are the main challenges facing the development of artificial intelligence industry.Among the three elements of ARTIFICIAL intelligence -- data, algorithm and computing power, computing power has become the key to restrict the further development of artificial intelligence industrialization.

How important is computational power?In the words of Wang Endong, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief scientist of Inspur Group, human society has quickly stepped into the age of intelligence, and computing power is the core driving force and productivity of this era.

‘There is a clear positive correlation between a country‘s GDP and its computing power,‘ Mr. Wang said. ‘The top five countries in global GDP are almost in line with the top five in global server shipments.‘Today‘s top 10 companies by market capitalization -- apple, amazon, Google, facebook, and so on -- are, without exception, among the top server buyers in the world.In a sense, computing power is productivity.

Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Hefei, Suzhou, Xi ‘an and Nanjing topped the list of China‘s ai cities in 2020, according to the latest report.Compared with 2019, Shenzhen overtook Hangzhou for second place, while Chongqing moved into the top tier.

From the perspective of application penetration in the artificial intelligence industry, the Internet still ranks the first, the application scenarios of telecommunications and manufacturing industry are more abundant, and the market potential is expected to be greatly improved.In the first half of 2020, the medical industry accelerated the application of ARTIFICIAL intelligence under the impact of the epidemic, and achieved remarkable results in many aspects, with the application penetration of artificial intelligence greatly improved.

In the opinion of ai experts, the performance of computing power is the key to further industrialization and "cleverness" of ARTIFICIAL intelligence.In the future, artificial intelligence will be more and more powerful and become a basic technology. Accordingly, it will have higher and higher requirements on computing power.

In April 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission defined for the first time the scope of "new infrastructure", which includes computing infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers.

The report also pointed out that artificial intelligence computing capability reflects the most cutting-edge innovation capability of a country. The investment in artificial intelligence computing power also indicates that the country attaches great importance to ARTIFICIAL intelligence at the strategic level, as well as the urgent vision of enterprises to improve their core competitiveness through the development opportunity of ARTIFICIAL intelligence.

If AI is to become "smart", computing power has to be upgraded.