Chapter 234 Tower of Babel in the Internet Era
Hornbill is an iconic product of the recent global Internet. Five million users is not a lot, and it is definitely not a lot for a product that is determined to kill Google.
But because of its unique technical advantages and product features, Hornbill has received a lot of attention from the industry. Both Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun have countless eyes staring at Hornbill, wanting to see what it wants to do and what it can do. Sample.
As the chief technology officer of Baidu, Wang Haifeng has seen the potential of Hornbill since its birth. He is also the representative figure within Baidu who led the acquisition of Hornbill.
After Hornbill made the first update, he did not hesitate to pay US$4.99 to Hornbill with his UnionPay credit card issued overseas.
Like his colleagues at Google, he wanted to see why this business called Global Communication dared to charge fees.
It’s not surprising that question-and-answer artificial intelligence charges. Foreign ChatGPT and domestic Wenxin charge for every word, but this is the first time that a search engine charges.
So just by charging money from Hornbill, Wang Haifeng realized that Alpha Technology was operating Hornbill as artificial intelligence.
The regular version gains customers, and the upgraded version makes profits.
But it’s right to think about it. It’s very simple logic. Both search engines and artificial intelligence require massive infrastructure, computing power, memory chips, electricity, etc.
Either rely on advertising or user payment.
Search engines rely on the former, and question-and-answer artificial intelligence relies on the latter. However, no matter how high the price you set for the latter, you will never be able to get your money back.
ChatGPT has set the price to 25 US dollars per month, and even 600,000 paying users cannot make a profit. Wang Haifeng is not optimistic that Alpha Technology can make a profit by selling members.
“Now that the paid function is launched, the pricing is estimated to be not even one-third of the cost. After all, they took a full US$5 billion H300 from Goldman Sachs. This amount is the same as what Microsoft buys in a year.
With a monthly membership of US$5, even if we win the entire ChatGPT market, we still can’t make up our money.
Not to mention that the giants of question-and-answer artificial intelligence are now making it free, and ChatGPT has opened all its functions for free. Alpha probably just wants to promote it in this way.
Cultivation of users’ awareness of payment. "Wang Haifeng thought as he completed the payment.
"Global Connect, opening up a bridge between language islands. ”
According to the introduction in the language you chose, Wang Haifeng chose Chinese. The introduction of Global Access members in bold font only has this sentence.
Wang Haifeng realized after seeing this sentence What kind of services does Hornbill provide?
It is clear that it provides a search engine service similar to translation.
Because you must know that China and America are not the only ones in the world.
The world is diverse. There are nearly 200 countries in the world. These countries and regions have diverse cultures and languages.
Chinese and English are undoubtedly the two most popular languages in the world. Together, these two languages account for more than 40% of the entire Internet, and this proportion is still increasing.
Many scholars even predict pessimistically that in the future, only Chinese and English will be the only languages left in the world, and other languages will disappear over time.
Chen Yuanguang has seen this kind of future with his own eyes. Four hundred years later, even languages that are not considered niche in the 21st century, such as Spanish and Arabic, will have died out.
Now, just from the integration of 4v people into the Simplified Chinese Internet, we can also see some signs.
You must know that 4v uses traditional Chinese, but due to the small population, there is too little content born on the island's Internet. Compared with their own Internet, the Simplified Chinese Internet has much more interesting content.
The content generated by 20 million people cannot be compared to the content generated by 1.4 billion people.
As a result, a large number of 4v young people went to play on the Simplified Chinese Internet, and the Matthew Effect was infinitely amplified.
Similarly, users from other small-language countries are constantly being siphoned away by the English-language Internet.
The same is true in the field of search engines. If you search for content in a small language, the content it can provide is not even as good as if you search for the same content in English.
For example, regarding French historical figures, the content richness and information density displayed on the English page are higher than those on the French page.
This is the current situation and the tragedy of small languages.
This is why there are more and more young people abroad, even if your native language is not English and the education you received is not in English, you still know some English.
After Wang Haifeng read the introduction on Hornbill's page, his guess was verified.
Yes, Hornbill will present more diversified content for your search and help you analyze it.
"I'll search for SpaceX." Wang Haifeng entered in the text box:
SpaceX
He has discovered in the past that Hornbill does not need to be used Question-and-answer format, you use it like a search engine text box, enter what you want to know, and it will naturally respond to you.
It just means that if you treat it as a conversational artificial intelligence, the more content you input, the more accurate it will be in understanding.
SpaceX is a company.
As before, there is a long list of introductions about SpaceX, and then some recent progress made by SpaceX. On the recommendation page, the page that appears, although the introduction is in Chinese , it is also in Chinese when you click it.
But after Wang Haifeng clicked in, he knew that the style of these pages was definitely not Chinese pages, and it was very obvious that the page style of foreign news websites.
Because the layout of domestic websites is generally relatively compact, focusing on text content, while foreign websites pay more attention to the display of pictures and videos.
Especially when you click on the page, a large cookie permission pop-up appears, which is a style that domestic news websites do not have. Domestic websites can only pop up a pop-up window asking you to register as a member.
After Wang Haifeng opened the page with a ladder, he found that it was indeed an English page. After looking at the content, Hornbill translated the page, and the translation accuracy was more accurate than the translation function of ordinary browsers.
Wang Haifeng was in a daze for a moment. He realized that a large number of users would abandon Baidu just for such a service.
Use Baidu to search for foreign related content. In addition to the Baidu Encyclopedia, the published content is of some value, but the entire page is filled with spam information from other Baijiahao accounts.
For users, instead of looking at the same content that has been chewed over by editors, it is better to look at foreign pages directly.
At $5, it's not cheap, but it's nothing for its target audience.
What Wang Haifeng wants to know more is that Hornbill's response speed is too fast.
Because it is equivalent to integrating Chinese and English pages into one display after being translated, the response speed is also at the millisecond level.
This is not normal and can only be achieved by the innovation of the underlying algorithm.
"The space station plan of France and Guangjia Aerospace"
Wang Haifeng changed another content, because this content involved French, Chinese and English. As he expected, the pages recommended by Hornbill included Chinese pages, French pages and English pages. All have been translated, so you can read the content directly.
“This is definitely a breakthrough comparable to the deep learning network in 2012.” Wang Haifeng’s face became increasingly red.
“Robin, Alpha Technology has come up with an amazing thing. Before, I only suspected that they had achieved innovation at the underlying algorithm level. This time I am sure of it.
This will be No less than Alex’s innovation!” Wang Haifeng called Robin Li almost immediately.
In the past, Stanford held an ImageNet competition every year, which meant letting machines recognize images. However, in 2012, the shocking "ImageNet moment" brought by deep neural networks represented by AlexNet made the development of AI completely advance by leaps and bounds.
In that competition, other competitors used a lot of resources and a lot of graphics cards, but Alex’s team only used two old graphics cards, but it was significantly ahead in the final recognition accuracy rate. in second place.
Since then, deep learning and convolutional neural networks have jumped from niche fields to become the most mainstream strategies in the field of artificial intelligence.
After listening to Wang Haifeng’s simple description, Robin Li understood the value of Hornbill.
Wang Haifeng read about technological innovation, while Robin Li realized the huge commercial value in it.
"Is it possible for Alpha Technology to hold an auction like Hinton?" Robin Li smiled bitterly: "I'm afraid Samad is not short of money.
It is impossible for it to sell Hornbill to us for US$44 million.
Even if this number is multiplied by 10, they probably won’t even take a look at it.
Two billion dollars, the license I give you is two billion dollars, buy Hornbill for less than two billion dollars. All are acceptable.
Ten billion is really too expensive.”
After Alex became famous in the ImageNet competition, Baidu was the first technology giant to approach them. At that time, Baidu offered an annual salary of US$12 million.
As a result, Alex and his teacher Hinton founded a company together, and they planned to sell the company to technology giants.
The method they chose was in a luxury hotel, where technology giants came to bid. Each round of bidding was no less than US$1 million. When Google increased the price to US$44 million, they took the initiative to stop. Choose to accept this price.
What else did Wang Haifeng want to say, but Robin Li continued without waiting for him to say:
“Haifeng, I know its value, but I don’t know if you have seen the risks it contains.
After we bought Hornbill, it contained huge risks. The White House would treat Hornbill like a short video platform.
The White House will even build a GFW on Americen's Internet to prevent American users from using Hornbill.
To be precise, it’s not even, but definitely.
So it has only technical value and almost zero commercial value.
The White House will not allow Americans to use Hornbill to open their eyes to the world.
Think about it carefully and prepare to leave for Malaysia after you have figured it out.
I even think that 2 billion US dollars is a risk. We are betting that if it can enter the European market and compete with Google, I think the price is worth it.
If the White House not only does not allow Americans to use Hornbill, but also does not allow allied countries to use Hornbill, without Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, then its value will be very limited.
However, considering that Baidu is now in a bottleneck period, we can take a gamble and it will not hurt even if we lose.
Do you think this type of application will really be allowed in China?
Because you used Hornbill to search for English pages, is it true that pages using the Hornbill channel are allowed as a special case and will not be blocked?
If Hornbill’s global communication function is castrated, what are its advantages?
Therefore, there is a high probability that Hornbill will become a special application for some small-language countries around the world in the future. Thinking from this perspective, its upper limit of value is 2 billion US dollars, with commercial value plus technical value, the most packaged 2 billion. "
After listening, Wang Haifeng realized that Robin Li's thinking was very mature, so he said nothing more: "Okay, I will ask my secretary to book a ticket for me to Malaysia. ”
For a long time in the past, the English Internet was the English Internet, and the Chinese Internet was the Chinese Internet. The two sides were like two ecologies that did not want to interfere with each other.
Although there will be various types of porters to move products from other ecology to this ecology to enhance mutual exchanges, such transfers are very few and cannot bring about any fundamental changes in the ecology.
As for the Internet ecology of other languages, they are slowly integrating into these two ecologies.
Hornbill's global membership can help residents of one of these ecosystems see the entire "Earth" in its entirety.
In other words, when an American searches for China-related content on Hornbill, he can see China’s web pages instead of the illusion created by BBC, CNN, and FOX, and he can also see China’s The content of the media is no longer taken out of context by Amerikan Media.
Similarly, when Chinese people search for news related to Amerikan, they can directly see the original content instead of artificially chewed and "translated" content.
Maybe sometimes, America and China are the same in not wanting you to see the real content.
“Hornbill Tower of Babel”
This is the number one trending term on Twitter in the US.
There is no doubt that after the launch of the Hornbill global communication function, it quickly became popular all over the United States. It itself caused a lot of dissatisfaction among American people because tk was banned. There are a lot of China-related travel videos on YouTube. , Huaguo’s electric vehicle evaluation videos continue to be popular.
Now there are new tools to circumvent the information cocoon created by American media, which is spreading rapidly among American’s young people.
In addition, the founder of Hornbill, Samad, is a top figure in the cryptocurrency circle. This caused Hornbill's influence to begin to fission out of the circle after launching Global Connect membership.
On the Internet, when the first person compared Hornbill to the Tower of Babel in the Internet era, it eliminated the language barriers between different races. Later, it was recognized by the majority of netizens.
“For the first time, I found that other countries’ webpages are so interesting. Hornbill will even explain to you the origin of their unique jokes.”
“Maybe foreign media also distort the facts. Reports, but when you read reports that distort the facts from different positions, it is better than just reading reports that distort the facts.”
“Stop it, brother, I’ve had enough. Media such as CNN, BBC, and FOX are lying and distorting. After having Hornbill, I finally no longer have to read their distorted reports after searching for China-related content.
The reports from self-media bloggers on YouTube are certainly positive, but they are too personal. On the contrary, the reports from Chinese media are very good at filling in the macro data that is difficult for individuals to touch. ”
(End of this chapter)