American scholar McClelland proposed an "iceberg theory": the skills that can be seen by the outside world are the superficial parts of a person exposed on the water, which are easy to be observed and imitated, while the deep qualities hidden "beneath the iceberg" , is the key to distinguishing top performers from mediocre performers.

In 2024, there will be no technology giant that does not talk about AI or does AI. Each company is trying to occupy a place on this future technology battlefield, but its performance is uneven.

Some companies are very effective and can continue to launch innovative technologies and AI products, attracting attention from the industry and the public; some companies have started but come to an end, with little response and no news after the models and products are launched on the market.

Compared with the superficial successes and failures, everyone must be like us and want to understand the deep qualities or determinants hidden under the iceberg behind a company’s outstanding AI performance. What are they?

Just today, Kunlun Wanwei founder Zhou Yahui’s circle of friends talked about this issue.

When talking about ByteDance’s AI performance in 2024, Zhou Yahui did not talk in general terms about the superficial reasons such as model parameters, computing power, and financing that are known to the public, but focused on organizational capabilities, the quality of top leaders, and multiple factors. Business collaboration, etc., have attracted the attention of AI practitioners, media, and analysts.

It can be said that Zhou Yahui’s circle of friends with strategic heights and profound insights has opened up for us the “part below the iceberg” needed to do a good job in AI. Let’s use this circle of friends to talk about the deep qualities that determine a company’s AI performance.

Zhou Yahui believes that although Byte’s 2023 AI strategy failed, this will not affect the full score performance of Byte’s 2024 AI strategy at all. The reason is that he predicted ByteDance’s organizational ability to quickly iterate (the ability to kill people).

Specifically, he believes that ByteDance has made two key organizational actions in 2024:

First, it has established an efficient and collaborative AI organizational mechanism.

ByteDance divided and integrated the organization of tens of thousands of people, split and reorganized the smart innovation team, and some members were assigned to various business lines to strengthen the integration of each business and AI technology. In addition, the search business department, AI Lab and AML (Applied Machine Learning) teams have all mobilized some people to support large language models, which will help Byte establish a leading advantage in AI technology.

The second is to be led by top leaders with strong comprehensive qualities.

Zhou Yahui highlighted two people, namely Zhu Wenjia (head of Tik Tok) and Alex (Zhu Jun, head of Musical.ly) of ByteDance. He believes that Zhu Wenjia is the next generation leader who is younger than Zhang Yiming (ByteDance), Huang Zheng (Pinduoduo), and Jiang Fan (Alibaba).

Why are top leaders and organizational mechanisms so critical in Zhou Yahui’s eyes?

To put it simply, the quality of top leaders and the organizational mechanism jointly determine the organizational efficiency of a company, and organizational efficiencyIt determines the AI ​​combat capabilities.

The characteristics of this wave of large AI models are:

Technology develops rapidly. If the organization’s efficiency and action capabilities cannot keep up with technological changes, it will be easily replaced by new models one after another. Technology is in a state of confusion;

The demand is still blank. Neither AI companies nor mass users know how to use AI, and large-scale research is needed. A lot of trial and error and exploration, this process must be firm and efficient;

The business model is unclear. When some real needs emerge, such as AIGC, AI search, and intelligent agents, they will soon attract a large number of technology companies and In AI team competition, those who perform well must not only be able to grasp needs keenly, but also move quickly to seize a favorable position.

These all require a company to have strong AI combat capabilities in order to gain a firm foothold in the wave of large models.

Faced with the "nail" of limited AI demand, the competition is who can forge the "hammer" of technology faster and smash it down with faster speed, greater strength, and higher frequency. . The first secret of Bytedance’s AI performance “under the iceberg” was pointed out directly by Zhou Yahui.

Let us continue to dive deeper and explore more secrets of technology companies under the AI ​​iceberg.

In Zhou Yahui’s view, another manifestation of Byte’s AI success in 2024 is the API economy + cloud services.

He predicted at the beginning of the year that the byte big model API would be vigorously used, and he would even find ways to make it mandatory for manufacturers to use it. Because the cloud is the key to Byte's future strategy, and the API economy is the key to the rise of Volcano Cloud, similar to the models of Google and Amazon.

API economy + AI cloud service, why is it important? Zhou Yahui may have seen at the beginning of the year that cloud and AI complement each other to form a company's business resilience.

On the one hand, the basic general large model must be used by individual developers and vertical enterprises through API (application interface) to develop more personalized and vertical AI applications, so that it can be recycled through scale effects. R&D costs, forming a virtuous business cycle.

On the other hand, AI requires a large amount of computing resources, which can directly drive the cloud usage of cloud service providers and become a new growth point in the cloud market. ByteDance, Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, Tencent and other manufacturers with their own computing infrastructure and cloud business can build a commercial moat through AI cloud services.

In 2024, large models will become the biggest variable in the competition in the public cloud market. ByteDance's cloud business Volcano Engine, which only started in 2021, has continued to increase its business growth and profit margins with its AI as a service. It has faced AI cloud giants such as Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Smart Cloud, etc., proving that Zhou Yahui's prediction at the beginning of the year was accurate. .

Building AI business resilience through API economy + cloud services can enable the sustainable development of an enterprise's AI strategy. This may also be the reason why Zhou Yahui gave ByteDance 2024’s AI performance high marks.

At present, Zhou Yahui’s judgment isIt is very consistent with the development trend of the AI ​​industry from 2024, and he believes that "Kunlun Wanwei's 24-year AI strategy has full marks myself. The reason is sufficiently differentiated that it has found its own small but beautiful space."

It can be seen that most of the companies that performed well in the AI ​​field this year have the above characteristics. For example, Baidu is personally led by Robin Li, who is comprehensively promoting the reconstruction of AI applications within the organization; Kimi of Dark Side of the Moon is commercializing rapidly; Huawei's Pangu model is also fully blossoming on the C-side and B-side, and has driven Ascend AI Cloud. The growth of services… …

The next question is, now that Zhou Yahui has gained insight into the deep qualities of a company’s AI performance and has seen the “part under the iceberg”, what is the performance of Kunlun Wanwei under his helm this year? Does it really deserve a perfect score?

Looking back at Kunlun Wanwei’s AI actions in 2024, three characteristics have been shown:

In terms of performance on the water, from the perspective of business performance, Kunlun Wanwei has always been in the field of large models. Maintain a leading position.

In terms of models, "Tiangong Model 3.0" was released in April 2024, using a 400 billion-level parameter MoE hybrid expert model. It is one of the MoE models with the largest model parameters and the strongest performance in the world; November 2024 In September, the 4o version of "Skywork 4o" was officially launched, and the o1 version of "Skywork 4.0" (Skywork o1) was officially launched for invitation testing. In terms of applications, Kunlun Wanwei has successfully launched a number of AI application products, including Tiangong AI intelligent assistant, Tiangong AI search, Tiangong SkyMusic, AI streaming music platform Melodio, music commercial creation platform Mureka, and AI short drama platform SkyReels , AI social product Linky, etc. These products cover multiple fields and have achieved good market performance.

The quality under the water, from the perspective of organizational capabilities and business resilience, Kunlun Wanwei’s breakthroughs this year are also obvious to all.

Currently, under the leadership of Zhou Yahui, Kunlun Technology is implementing the development strategy of "All in AGI and AIGC". Kunlun Technology's R&D expenses in the first three quarters of 2024 will increase to 1.14 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8.45% %, and continue to increase technology accumulation, application exploration, and business development. It can be seen that global leading AI products such as LLM, GPT-4o, Sora, Suno, and o1 have opened up new technology tracks. As the first echelon in China, Kunlun Wanwei has filled the domestic gaps in a timely manner, narrowed the technology generation gap, and performed well. It has demonstrated extremely strong technical strength and combat capabilities.

It has formed significant differences with other AI technology companies, especially in overseas markets. Kunlun Wanwei leverages its existing advantages and continues to promote AI technology to cooperate with overseas companies to provide customized AI solutions. , which brings significant advantages to Kunlun Wanwei’s AI productization and commercialization.

As the core of the fourth industrial revolution, AI technology hasThe journey of industrialization has just begun.

Compared with the shallow part of the iceberg that is easily visible to the outside world, the comprehensive quality hidden under the iceberg is the key force that allows Chinese companies to go further and more stably in the AI ​​era. This is exactly The inspiration that the iceberg theory brings to China's science and technology is also the inspiration that Zhou Yahui's circle of friends brings to the industry.

Through a circle of friends, we saw the belief and vision of a group of domestic AI leaders. They led the fleet to sail through 2024 and will also sail to the starry sea of ​​AI.