How do artificial intelligence start-ups compete with unicorns on the same stage?

Artificial intelligence is the biggest way out in the past decade and has even become a national strategy. The "window" of social events has attracted countless heroes to compete. A number of "unicorns" came into being. The rise of the "unicorn" in two years has blurred historical experience, and the "unicorn" no longer has the meaning of time. At that time, Ai Jianghu was crowded. However, dancing with the wild animals on the tuyere is a huge risk: there are only a handful of enterprises that have been overturned by hurricanes or crushed by unicorns and can ride the wind to heaven.

How to compete with unicorns and survive in artificial intelligence? This "Huarong Road", a company called "Xiaobai Century" skillfully passed the battle.

Shangtang Technology is a unicorn in the field of artificial intelligence. This company, which was born at the end of 20 14, initially relied on the media laboratory of Professor Tang Xiaoou of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the deep learning ultra-deep network reached 1208 (the more layers, the greater the difficulty and the higher the accuracy), while Google had 22 layers and Microsoft had 152 layers in the same period; Its original algorithm has accumulated as many as 57 items, ahead of MIT (565,438+0 items), Berkeley (33 items) and Oxford (45 items). It has published 84 papers in CVPR, ICCV and ECCV, the world's top conferences on computer vision, second only to Microsoft's 124 papers and ahead of Google's 52 papers. Recently, the company completed a series B financing of 41000000 USD, with a valuation of over 654380+050000 USD, becoming a "unicorn" camp and a behemoth. However, such a unicorn is closely watched by another "newborn calf" born in Tsinghua University, a top university in China. At this time, Xiaobai Century completed the PreA RMB financing with only one piece of paper entering CVPR. Two visual AI companies with such disparity in magnitude are located in Tsinghua Science and Technology Park, the top science and technology park in China. One is bright and the other is dark, and unicorns and calves are secretly competing. Recently, it was revealed that these two companies appeared on the rostrum of the exhibition center of China National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone. * * * both won the "Top 20 Innovation Pioneers in China" award sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, which selected outstanding projects from all over the world, including those from the United States, Britain, Israel and other countries. Xiaobai Century was crowned with the attitude of bravely exploring and innovating, providing video content adaptation tools with high efficiency and low cost.

(Zhongguancun Innovation Ecological Season sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China)

(The first on the left is the representative of Xiaobai Century, and the sixth on the right is the representative of Shangtang Technology)

As a start-up, why does Xiaobai Century dare to challenge unicorns, and why can it enjoy the honor with unicorns?

After carefully examining the landing business of the two companies, Xiaobai Century is based on the innovation of video search technology and takes making the most friendly advertisement as the starting point. Shangtang Technology, based on the original technology focusing on computer vision and deep learning, provides multi-field and multi-dimensional services such as security, face recognition and advertising. Both companies are based on computer vision and deep learning technology, but there is a huge gap in scale and the number of scientists. Dr. Du Qiang, the founder of Xiaobai Century, introduced that Xiaobai Century can stand on the same podium with a small body and enjoy the honor.

First of all, we should actively cooperate with industry giants to find business entry points with the attitude of being willing to marry. The knowledge of today's society is that artificial intelligence will transform the future society, but how to bring technology to the ground to produce tangible social benefits is the key point in the historical process. Usually, it is difficult for technology companies to grow fair business alone and need to cooperate with the industry, especially in the AI industry. As a pioneering enterprise on the cusp, although there is wind (as China Taoism says), the wind may also make people lose their way. Therefore, we should take the initiative to find industry giants (general industry giants will not deviate too much from the general direction of market demand) and seek cooperation to make a wedding dress for people. Xiaobai Century cooperated with "Entgroup", a well-known listed company of China film and television data, to deeply understand some pain points of the film and television industry, complete technical transformation, and empower the industry for the first time: define the demand. And on this basis, complete the second level of the empowerment industry: accurately define products. Make the iterative update of products continue to move in the right direction.

The second is to verify the niche market (many small markets around the main market) and adjust the cutting direction in real time. Parallel to the first point is to verify the niche market. Usually, there will be some niche markets around the main markets in some emerging fields, which are inconspicuous at first, but in the middle and late stage of the development of the main markets, these niche markets may become new main markets, or generate invisible champions with very high turnover or cash flow. Wise entrepreneurs will not compete with giants for the main market at the beginning, but try their best to find a niche market, and then repeatedly examine whether this market is a real market, whether it is big enough, and what restrictions and barriers there are, and repeatedly demonstrate. It is in the process of cooperation with industry giants that Xiaobai Century discovered some niche markets for video processing. For example, a TV series shot by a film and television company had to be replaced because of well-known reasons, but the shooting was almost completed and the capital investment was huge. The film company is in a hurry. Knowing this news, Xiaobai Century quickly solved the producer's problem and replaced the protagonist's face efficiently through technical means. It saves a lot of costs for investors. After investigation, there is still a great market demand, and at present, visual artificial intelligence companies have just begun to cultivate in this field. Data, algorithm and scene are the three elements of the development of artificial intelligence. We are asked about the source of data on many occasions. The reason why video advertising is chosen as the starting point is because the video content itself is data. These resources are public, and we can mine data to use them without relying on user behavior data. User behavior data itself is a scarce resource and a treasure of giants, which is difficult to obtain at low cost. Xiaobai Century did not cut into the fields of safety and autonomous driving at first, but now it seems that the super giants in these two fields have entered the market and the competition in the Red Sea has emerged. Therefore, as a start-up, Xiaobai Century's video advertising direction decision is far-sighted and determined. Of course, there are more complicated factors in strategic choice, so I won't go into details.

Third, after verifying the requirements, we should combine the technology and grafting technology in other fields to form a better solution with technical barriers. At present, Shangtang Technology is doing the application of AI video recognition in the advertising field, and another company, Face++, which is financed by 1 billion dollars, is also doing it, but their advertisements only improve the accuracy in the scene dimension, and the form is still actively pushing advertisements, which still causes some troubles for users to watch movies. On the one hand, Xiaobai Century increased its investment in R&D, and Dr. Huang Gao, a technical consultant, won the title of Best Paper 20 17 of CVPR, the top academic conference on global visual ai, which enabled Xiaobai Century to build the most advanced video recognition network architecture, effectively improving the accuracy and speed of video recognition.

Dr. Huang Gao's CVPR Best Paper Denseley Connected Convective Network

The team went to Cornell University for an exchange visit (founder Dr. Du Qiang (second from right) and Dr. Huang Gao (first from right)).

On the other hand, the empowerment of technology transformation industry is completed through technology grafting. Usually, after the birth of new technology, the connection between technology and business is not natural, just like holding a hammer of technology to find a nail of business. Either the hammer is too big or the nail is too small, and it will hurt your hand if you knock hard. Hammer and nail are basically not natural. The solution is either to polish the hammer to fit the nail or to find the nail again. In addition, another desirable method is to find a bracket between the hammer and the nail to make the whole process reasonable and natural. This kind of grafting is often difficult and effective, but engineers need to roll up their sleeves, go deeper, dare to walk wide, hold their breath, and constantly study new technologies in order to gain the penetration ahead of their peers. Xiaobai Century introduced video technologies such as "pixel tracking", "super-pixel tracking" and "motion tracking", automatically analyzed and captured video local dynamic images, took the lead in realizing local video in, and opened up new forms of native video advertising under ai technology, thus completing technical transformation and empowering the third level of the industry: engineering realization. The product definition and engineering realization of competitors' artificial intelligence technology are only accurate in advertising, and there is no more research on the form of advertising. From the media form, words, pictures and sounds can be adapted (implanted) at a very low cost in the past, but the technology of adapting video content has not yet flown into the homes of ordinary people. If Meitu Xiu Xiu used to let fools beautify pictures, then White Century let fools beautify and adapt local video content, which is a great expansion and promotion of media expression. Xiaobai Century Machine automatically implants native advertisements. It has improved the viewing experience of users and the efficiency of advertising placement, gradually formed a set of solutions with technical barriers, and established its own local competitive advantage, which is also an important reason for Xiaobai Century to win the prize. The measure of technology grafting is that technology must be able to improve the quality and competitiveness of solutions, not for technology or to establish competitive barriers.

The fourth is to grasp the rhythm and tailor it. What's the best tactic? As the saying goes, the most suitable is the best, which also applies to start-ups. One problem that needs to be paid attention to in technology grafting is to grasp the rhythm and tailor it. Also in Tsinghua Science Park, there is a returnee team who came back from a famous foreign university to do NLP (Natural Language Processing). After the angel round financing was completed, they focused on the frontier of science and technology and decided to develop chips to meet business needs. But there was no hardware talent in the company before. Of course, making chips can enhance the competitiveness of your products, but the funds of Angel Wheel are extremely limited. Can you go that far in one step? Do you need to boast that far? This decision lacks a stronger basis, and the prospect of this company is very bad at present. It is also one of the most common mistakes made by entrepreneurs since the maturity of the financing market. One of the important reasons is that Xiaobai Century has made every financing right at this stage.

The fifth is to seek the support and cooperation of incubators with industrial background. ARM Accelerator, a subsidiary of ARM (the world's largest mobile phone processor company, accounting for 90% of the global mobile phone processor market share), helped to incubate the Little White Century and cooperated with Masayoshi Son, an early investor of Alibaba. Jiang, head of Changhong ARM incubator, said: Century has formed an excellent team. We are optimistic about the innovation and planning ability of Xiaobai Century. Our mission is to make entrepreneurs start businesses in China no different from those in Silicon Valley. The ARM incubator has brought a different global perspective to Xiaobai Century, enabling Xiaobai Century to find a development path suitable for ai start-ups from a larger perspective of the global industry.

The delicate lotus flower bud shows a sharp corner from the water, and a naughty little dragonfly stands on its head. Competing with unicorns, Xiaobai Century reached the podium of the world in a unique way. (Wen Qiaoge)