We often hear the phrase "entrepreneurship is a life of nine deaths", and Ma Yun also said that entrepreneurship is a very difficult road, 100 people start a business, 95 people die. In China, entrepreneurship can allow people's potential to be deeply explored, and only entrepreneurship that originates from love can be stable and far-reaching. On December 12, in the live broadcast room of "Old Yu Gossip", Yu Minhong, founder of New Oriental, and Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, started a dialogue, and one of the key topics of conversation was entrepreneurship, telling the story of how scientists grow into entrepreneurs and how technology companies do source innovation.
iFLYTEK is an enterprise deeply engaged in artificial intelligence technology, and it is also the first company in China to be successfully listed by college students. As the saying goes, "the train runs fast, it all depends on the headband", in this group of college students, the spiritual mentor Wang Renhua and the team flag bearer Liu Qingfeng played a vital role. In the program, Liu Qingfeng talked about the kindness of his mentor Wang Renhua, and with the support of teacher Wang Renhua, Liu Qingfeng led a wave of alumni of USTC to embark on the road of artificial intelligence technology entrepreneurship.
In the 90s, there was a "fever for going abroad" in China, and Yu Minhong seized the rigid need for English training for international students in his early entrepreneurship. As the master of the University of Chinese Science and Technology, Liu Qingfeng also considered going abroad for further study, but was pulled back to reality by the inspiring words of Wu Zongji, a teacher of Chinese Chinese phonology, "We have been choked by the throat, and Chinese pronunciation should be done best by the Chinese". At the end of the nineties, Liu Qingfeng resolutely gave up the opportunity to go abroad and was determined to realize the industrialization of Chinese Chinese pronunciation technology, which was the original intention of iFLYTEK and Liu Qingfeng's entrepreneurial ideal.
As an entrepreneur, it is not enough to rely on the hot ideals, but also to have a broad mind and unique leadership charm at the helm. In the program, Liu Qingfeng said that entrepreneurship needs to rely on team spirit, and in that year, Wang Renhua's mentor was willing to give young people opportunities and help young people succeed, not only teaching his life's hard work and accumulation, but also willing to share the benefits.
From voice technology to artificial intelligence technology, and then to today's cognitive model, iFLYTEK has been deeply engaged in source innovation and insisted on starting from the "seed" stage. When faced with Yu Minhong's soul torture of "what qualities should the CEO of a technology company have", Liu Qingfeng said frankly that first of all, we must have a keen insight into the advanced layout of the future strategy, because the technology of the technology industry will continue to break through, not only to keep up step by step, but also to walk in the front. For example, the deep neural network that was all the rage in 2016, the iFLYTEK team began to pay attention to it as early as 2010, and now the world's popular large model, which includes a deep pre-trained transformer algorithm, thanks to the long-term layout of iFLYTEK in cognitive intelligence, can promote the rapid launch and update iteration of the Spark large model.
In a sense, Liu Qingfeng has completed the successful transformation from a scientist to an entrepreneur in the course of more than 20 years of entrepreneurship. When asked by Yu Minhong how the transformation from a scientist to an entrepreneur was realized, Liu Qingfeng said frankly that he wanted to do core research and development from the beginning, believing that only engaging in algorithms and research is innovation, and he only wanted to be a "sharpshooter". Later, Liu Qingfeng gradually realized that in order to win the tough battle of technological industrialization, someone must be the "marshal" and command a group of "sharpshooters" to shoot at the common anchor point.
In the process of entrepreneurship, the core backbone team of iFLYTEK has maintained a very good cohesion. Liu Qingfeng attributed it to three points, the first point is that the team's dream of career development is the same, with the common goal of "making machines able to speak, understand and think", and set up a great dream of not only being the first in China, but also striving to be the first in the world. The second point is to form a relatively tolerant corporate culture that dares to speak the truth. The third point is that entrepreneurs should roll up their sleeves and take the lead in difficult times, and give full play to their role as role models.
Even after two external extreme pressures in 2019 and last year, the core team was able to withstand the test, continuously strengthen core technology research and development and independent controllability, and turned the crisis into a turning point. "Seeds are bred in dark soil, and without firm conviction in the middle, they will not survive the cold winter and eventually bud and wait to be released. Liu Qingfeng said.
Today, Liu Qingfeng has become a role model for countless entrepreneurs, especially college students. When asked by Yu Minhong: "Who do you admire the most?"At that time, Liu Qingfeng named three candidates, namely Apple founder Steve Jobs, Tesla founder Elon Musk and Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei. He believes that the biggest characteristic of these people is that they are committed to using the power of hard-core technology to change the development process of human society, just like Jobs's motto "To live is to change the world", in fact, Liu Qingfeng also has the same dream, which is also the goal that iFLYTEK has been trying to achieve, that is, "building a better world with artificial intelligence".