Alan Kay, a famous computer scientist who won the Turing Award, once said, "Those who really care about software should make their own hardware." This statement indicated a trend in technological development and later became the core idea of Apple's product development philosophy, establishing Apple's current technological empire. In fact, Alan Kay proposed this idea as early as the 1970s, and its practitioners and believers have spread all over the world. It continues to this day in the era of AI. Many technology companies are constantly trying product models that integrate software and hardware, and iFLYTEK is one of them.
On June 27th, iFLYTEK, a technology company from Hefei, China, officially released the iFLYTEK Star Courseware V4.0 in Beijing. Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFLYTEK, presided over the launch event for this AI model. He and his colleagues spent two hours introducing the application scenarios of the Star Courseware in various fields such as medical, education, and business to government, university, scientific research institutions, and corporate customers through different on-site simulative demonstrations, many of which are based on iFLYTEK's self-developed intelligent hardware products.
For example, in the education scenario, Liu Qingfeng also presented a new product called "Star Intelligent Grading Machine." Liu Cong, the dean of iFLYTEK Research Institute, demonstrated how teachers can use this product to improve the efficiency of grading student assignments. According to Liu Qingfeng, the iFLYTEK AI learning machine equipped with the Star Courseware has won the sales champion of the learning machine category on both JD.com and Tmall's platforms for two consecutive years during the 618 shopping festival.
Voice-related technology has always been iFLYTEK's traditional advantage. Since the early days of its start-up, it has been determined to focus on voice recognition. Therefore, every product release of iFLYTEK will have different degrees of upgrades around its voice product line. At this launch event, iFLYTEK released the iFLYTEK simultaneous interpretation system that combines software and hardware and supports various scenarios such as conference simultaneous interpretation, exhibition simultaneous interpretation, and tourism simultaneous interpretation.
A few days ago on June 24th, the "Multilingual Intelligent Speech Key Technologies and Industrialization" project led by iFLYTEK won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award as the first completion unit. At this launch event, the Star Voice Model released the free-switching speech recognition capability of multiple languages and dialects. It supports "free dialogue" in 37 languages and 37 dialects. iFLYTEK staff also demonstrated the speech recognition scenarios of iFLYTEK input method that mixes dialects and foreign languages, as well as the speech recognition scenarios of three-person overlap and role separation.
Since the release of the iFLYTEK translation machine in 2016, iFLYTEK has expanded its hardware product line to a large extent. Now it has used the Star Courseware to connect the entire C-end software and hardware product ecology. The so-called "Star Whole Family Bucket" product line has taken shape.
According to the official introduction of iFLYTEK, for example, documents from iFLYTEK smart office computers or smart recording pens can be synchronized to the Star personal space with just one click. By combining data interchange and operation linkage to synchronize meeting records from a notebook to the Star space, the Star Courseware can be used to write official documents, make PPTs, and generate to-do items.
According to iFLYTEK, during the "618 Shopping Festival" this year, the sales volume of iFLYTEK's AI hardware products with the Star Courseware increased by more than 70% year-on-year, with an average monthly usage frequency of more than 40 million.
However, the expansion of the product line has also brought risks to iFLYTEK. From the financial data point of view, due to iFLYTEK's increasing investment in AI models and related business, its losses are increasing. The company's Q1 financial report in 2024 showed that its net income attributable to equity holders and net income attributable to equity holders after deduction were reduced by RMB 242 million and RMB 102 million respectively over the same period last year, mainly because the company is investing heavily in general-purpose AI and cognitive AI large models. The financial report further explained that although the above-mentioned investment has affected the company's short-term operating performance, it has laid a solid foundation for further consolidating iFLYTEK's position in the national AI team industry.
In addition to the application scenarios, Liu Qingfeng emphasized that the iFLYTEK Star Courseware V4.0 is based on the first domestically produced milli-card computing power cluster. The training of the Star Courseware is based on Huawei Ascend GPU, while the training of other domestic large models still relies on NVIDIA GPU. "The Star Courseware is the only large model that achieves pure domestic computing power algorithm and can prove what stage of development a fully independent and controllable large model can reach now."
Blue Whale News, June 28th (Reporter Zhang Xinyu)- "Those who really care about software should make their own hardware." This famous judgment in the technology industry comes from the famous computer scientist Alan Kay, who won the Turing Award. This indicated a trend in technological development, and was later used by Jobs to express Apple's product development philosophy, establishing Apple's current technological empire. In fact, Alan Kay proposed this idea as early as the 1970s, and its practitioners and believers have spread all over the world. It continues to this day in the era of AI. Many technology companies are constantly trying product models that integrate software and hardware, and iFLYTEK is one of them.
According to the official introduction of iflytek co.,ltd., Xinghuo V4.0 is ahead of other domestic large models in text generation, language understanding, knowledge Q&A, logical reasoning, and mathematical ability. It is overall superior to GPT-4 Turbo under OpenAI, and only slightly inferior in code and multimodal capabilities. In 12 mainstream test sets in Chinese and English at home and abroad, it ranks first in 8 of them.
"I hope that the Xinghuo large model can answer two key questions today: What is the technology behind China's large model, and how can large models be implemented." Liu Qingfeng summarized.
However, due to the drag of the large cap, iflytek's stock price did not perform well on June 27, falling 3.62% to 43.14 yuan, while a year ago, its stock price had reached a historical high of 81.9 yuan.