Produced by |At the forefront of entrepreneurship.
Author |Wang Zhuoran, Wen Hua.
Edit |Lightning.
American Editor |Wu Yizhong.
Audit |Ode.
At the beginning of 2023, the popularity of ChatGPT surprised everyone. Soon, players around the world continued to follow suit, and the related industries and industries ushered in great changes.
AIGC, that is, artificial intelligence-generated content, its generated content includes text, images, sounds, 3D models, etc. ChatGPT is a typical text-generating AI language model.
Figure: Photo.com, based on VRF protocol).
Sequoia Capital has been at the forefront of the application of the text field, and it can output high-quality copywriting in the vertical field around 2023;However, the fields of image and ** are limited by the development of multimodal large models, and the progress will be a little slower.
It is an indisputable fact that the continuous surge of AIGC is changing the direction of more and more industries.
IM, instant messenger, is a very subdivided track in the Internet world, and it is also one of the most frequently used applications in people's daily life and work. The text, images, and ** within its application are the areas where AIGC focuses on "transformation".
The IM PaaS service allows developers to call and integrate IM capabilities into applications in the form of SDK APIs, and has communication capabilities such as content transmission, group management, and session management. Among them, the content types include text, emojis, voices, files, notifications, etc.
According to this inference, the IM PaaS track that focuses on TO B is bound to have a great future under the wave of AIGC. But what are the specific implications?What are the similarities and differences between domestic and foreign?To this end, Jiemian News Entrepreneurship Forefront chatted with Zhao Guibin, CEO of Huanxin, on this topic, hoping to answer the above questions.
Jiemian News: Entrepreneurship Frontline: In the post-epidemic era, the overall demand of enterprises is still to reduce costs and increase efficiency, what is the prospect of the SaaS industry?When the tide of AIGC is coming, will to B enterprises be cautious or fully embrace AICG?
Zhao Guibin: SaaS companies of different sizes face different problems and deal with them in different ways. But in recent years, there has been a prevalent view that China's SaaS is a "pseudo-demand" or "pseudo-performance".
On the one hand, everyone wants to be stronger and bigger, thinking that the business is too vertical, too focused, and not challenging. Everyone wants to do top. But on the other hand, the demand side often does not recognize the value of the first party.
In some foreign products, more attention is paid to reducing the cost of services in revenue, that is, the cost of people. But this doesn't work at all in China, especially for traditional companies. For example, some enterprises have started to talk about cloud native, but their customers, whether large or medium-sized enterprises, have not even done digitalization. Therefore, SaaS is facing the challenge of a serious mismatch between the perception of the first side and the demand side in China.
When the tide came up, the "light" went down, and relying on the power of capital, the enterprise was done, and the market value increased tenfold or even dozens of times. And when the tide goes out, who can hold on is the key.
In the past one or two years, the level of cost reduction and efficiency improvement has no longer simply looked at the numbers, but from the original pursuit of big and complete to the pursuit of products or services of the profit model, to find the real work, can really bring leverage and multiplier effect.
Interface News: Entrepreneurship Frontier: After capital comes in, will it have a big impact on the industry?
Zhao Guibin: Capital is pushing you behind, enterprises have money in their hands, they are pursuing big and complete, they want to try in every field, and every bet is not small. In the end, it was found that the real estate industry, which played with the largest leverage in the first ten years, was the first to show its "original form". Whether it is from micro actions or large market changes, bubbles are more serious. However, in recent years, SaaS companies are doing subtraction to make products more focused and more competitive.
Interface News - Entrepreneurship Frontier: AIGC, is it a flash in the pan for the industry?
Zhao Guibin: From a technical point of view, the early stage was very pessimistic. It can be said that most of the businesses in the market are not prepared for the sudden outbreak of AIGC. Subsequently, everyone saw its great potential.
In the future, whether it is generative or other innovation, 2023 will be the base point of the outbreak of AIGC. It's going to iterate much faster than any of our previous technologies. As it stands, AIGC is a growing momentum.
Interface News: What is the significance of AIGC for the SaaS industry?
Zhao Guibin: At present, 8 licenses have been issued in China, which may be different from the global situation. But the core question is how the capabilities of AIGC, or generative AI, can be combined with SaaS business. Agora has also made some attempts, but we always believe that everyone's opportunities should still be in their own hands, and the biggest opportunity is still in the direction of the track with the longest investment.
In other words, use AIGC to do some speeding up in the original strong area, rather than relying on AIGC to completely change the fate. Including SaaS companies suddenly forcibly binding AI, or even saying that they will make large models themselves, and gradually develop themselves in the direction of AI proportion, in fact, there is not much opportunity.
Interface News - Entrepreneurship Frontline: Huanxin is an IM PaaS platform, what does AI mean to social networking?
Zhao Guibin: I think AI is a "double-edged sword" for human beings, or a "double-edged sword" for social networking.
Because AI joins the network where people are connected, AI is super powerful, and in the early stage, it will slowly turn the original multi-connected network into a star network. The original mesh network may degenerate into a linear network. For example, everyone's main communication is with the artificial intelligence in the middle, and there will be fewer connections between people.
Another problem is that now everyone hopes to use technology to screen people, find more suitable friends, and conduct more efficient online and offline real social interactions. However, after the emergence of AIGC, there may be a situation where some people no longer need to socialize in real life. For example, some people who are afraid of society may just talk to a robot with AIGC function.
In addition, the emergence of think tank-type agents will be a relatively big trend. Through technical means, such as medical knowledge or further education knowledge is placed in the intelligent body, such as the problem of choosing a major for further study, you may not need to go to Zhang Xuefeng, you may directly find an agent with AIGC capabilities in this field, it will give direct answers based on large models, and even how to manage money, educate children, and how to learn professional knowledge can also directly give solutions.
In the future, it is possible to achieve this in the form of IM+AI agents. In addition, because the scope of AI is so wide, it is no longer limited to the social field, but may bloom in the whole industry.
Jiemian News: Entrepreneurship Frontier: It seems that the integration of AI and IM will be the trend of the times in the future
Zhao Guibin: It is mainly manifested in four aspects.
The first is "collaborative activity innovation":When user-generated content (UGC) cannot meet the needs of diversity, multiple people and AI work together to produce content in a way that can meet the needs of more people in the community. The participation of AI makes these diverse collaboration scenarios more efficient and can improve the satisfaction of community participants. In these scenarios, the communication between users and the communication between users and AI auxiliary roles is inseparable from the support of IM.
The second is the "expert assistance system for serious scenes":In serious scenarios such as medical treatment and legal trials, the expert support system will be assisted by one or more AI agents. On the basis of the content provided by the AI agent, human experts combine their own professional judgment to integrate the content that is finally fed back to the user. In this process, the communication between the expert and the user still needs the support of IM.
The third is "social diversity".The addition of AI is not to replace IM collaboration, but to make the traditional social atmosphere more colorful. For example, novel gameplay such as "shake it", "dynamically generated emojis", and "blind box gifts" can increase the freshness of the community and improve user stickiness. The user's participation will allow the AI agent to get more feedback and become stronger through continuous learning, forming a virtuous circle of positive feedback.
The fourth is "IM's Community Relationship Maintenance".IM is not only a channel, but also a maintainer of community relationships (e.g., friends, levels, permissions, etc.). How to normalize this information to various AI LLMs and integrate these meta-information into AI-generated content and logical reasoning requires IM quotient to cooperate with different AI large models to provide the corresponding meta-information + message transmission and management framework, so that AI can better receive and process non-verbal information.
Interface News: Entrepreneurship Frontier: Among the applications on the current market, do you think there are any products that are easier to use in combination with AIGC?
Zhao Guibin: Actually, DingTalk is already doing these things. For example, in the minutes of the meeting, there are hundreds of messages in the group, and DingTalk can summarize the core points of the information concepts communicated in the group, which is something that AI can do. Because such functions are more digital and integrated with enterprises, it is necessary to give full play to the collaboration ability of intelligent twins to improve office efficiency.
Interface News: Entrepreneurship Frontier: What changes will be made to the interaction of IM in the future?
Zhao Guibin: The core of technology is to change the way people interact. One of the latest experiments in the industry is to create a large model of sound, recognize human intention based on sound, and at the same time use non-invasive brain waves to correspond to sound, and finally let the large model produce the results.
The results of the experiment were quite impressive. A large model of brainwave and sound isomorphism can analyze the changes of brainwaves according to the speaker's voice and establish a connection between the two. "This is a new direction for the gradual escalation of interaction in the future. It sounds scary, but the future isn't impossible.
Interface News: Entrepreneurship Frontline: In the two years since joining Agora, how has Huanxin done in the direction of going overseas?
Zhao Guibin: With the help of Agora's overseas ecology, the overseas business of Huanxin is also deepening.
IM is our basic disk, but in the future, we hope to make our business bigger, and the positioning of Huanxin will return to "we are the gene of serving developers". But in the future, IM may be a front stop. When serving our customers, we have accumulated a lot of information from all walks of life.
From an ecological point of view, we bring in a number of third-party partners. On the one hand, we provide them with one-stop services, and also help them avoid some "pitfalls" that may be encountered in the early stage of their business, and also help them match and dock some services that need to be purchased, because there are a large number of third-party partners on the platform, who not only use Huanxin's products, but also partners in the ecosystem.
For example, some customers want to go overseas, but some things can't be done by themselves, such as payment, settlement, realization, or translation when facing language problems, or content review, etc., Huanxin's partners have found corresponding service providers to connect. It is equivalent to in our service, we can also achieve "one-stop sea".
In the future, our product managers, including our service team, will change from the current product technical support to "consulting", and we may have a dedicated consultant role to help customers achieve business success in the future.
Interface News: What are the similarities and differences between Huanxin and Agora?
Zhao Guibin: After merging into Agora, a lot of confidence was given by Agora. The overall team temperament of Agora is very similar to that of Huanxin, the leadership is all technical background, and everyone's formal meetings are to discuss the product and how to bring value to developers.
Although Agora will focus on finance and the market, it is still most concerned about the value of the product itself and its position on the track, which is a common point for enterprises that truly adhere to long-termism.
Agora is a technology-driven company, and it is also more compatible with the idea of daily management. The talent density of Agora should be higher than that of some large manufacturers, and their way of thinking, when encountering problems and solving problems, is not a headache and a foot pain, but a systematic combing, and finally looking at the long-term goal and finding a solution.
Founder and CEO Bin Zhao (Tony) has always emphasized long-termism. Returning to the topic of AI, we believe that no matter how advanced the technology is, the need for social interaction and basic communication between people will not disappear in the short term. So Tony has always said that IM (instant messaging) must be a strong demand and a basic need in the next few decades.
Tony is optimistic about Huanxin, because IM and RTE are natural synergistic product matrix, he believes that compared with the sound **, Huanxin IM is doing the Internet's "water, electricity and coal", which is a connector.
Jiemian News - Entrepreneurship Frontline: In all kinds of cloud services, security must be an unavoidable topic, so what are the characteristics of security compliance in overseas markets?
Zhao Guibin: Overseas focuses more on business compliance, the protection of users' private data, and the protection of users' right to know. Therefore, on Huanxin's overseas products, users can choose the "forget me" function, once selected, the past data will be completely deleted in the system;The second is the protection of users' assets, such as regular key updates of data, and data from transmission to storage to meet the requirements of different security standards.
User data is the highest level of security compliance, both nationally and in the EU. Therefore, Huanxin will never do data monetization-related business. For example, in order to solve problems such as high costs, we will find optimization solutions from the technology itself, but we will never "do anything" at the level of user perception.
In the second half of 2022, the entire R&D team of Huanxin invested six months to transform overseas product compliance. These "stupid efforts" or these difficult things seem to be a lot of investment now, but we believe that sooner or later it will pay off.
Interface News • Entrepreneurship Frontier: What are the advantages of Huanxin in terms of security compliance?
Zhao Guibin: When it comes to technical compliance in China, it is more about meeting the requirements of the industry when operating various businesses in China, such as encryption, data transmission channels, storage and other technical security requirements. For example, at the technical level, including all information cannot be breached, encryption is invisible, etc.
Huanxin itself is based on a more basic technical service, and hopes to rely on its own security as much as possible. Although it is still based on cloud vendors, it hopes to gradually become an autonomous and controllable architecture in the future.
Agora does not rely on any basic manufacturer in the world, and regards itself as a "basic operator". The model is to purchase the bare computer rooms of various operators around the world, and then build their own services, so the reliability is very high. In 2021, Huanxin has been in the first place since it was merged into Agora Network, and in the future, it is hoped that the entire infrastructure service can be built on the foundation of Agora Network.
Jiemian News: Entrepreneurship Frontier: How do you view the impact of AI on the development trend of the IM PaaS industry?What are the plans for 2024?
Zhao Guibin: The advancement of AI technology is driving a wave of innovation in the Internet industry, and instant messaging (IM) is gradually playing a greater role. Observing the development trend of the IM PaaS industry, we can see that the industry is developing in a more efficient and intelligent direction, and the application of AI will give more possibilities to IM. From the perspective of providing more value to customers, Huanxin will further deepen its investment in the AI field in 2024, with a view to playing a greater role in this industry.
Huanxin's product planning will be divided into three levels. The top-level strategy is to provide complete solutions for vertical scenarios such as social entertainment, mainly focusing on the interaction scenarios between humans and agents, so as to provide a new user experience and help customers increase revenue. The strategy of the middle layer is to improve the existing IM experience through the application of AI, mainly including providing richer interaction methods and enhancing user experience.
The underlying strategy is to connect AI large model services, cooperate with the world's leading AI model vendors to provide more diversified services, and use IM's existing organizational capabilities to quickly add AI robot services to existing applications. This will further enhance the user experience and enable Huanxin to maintain its leading position in the IM PaaS industry. Overall, Huanxin's plan for 2024 is to deeply integrate AI technology with IM services to provide more efficient and intelligent communication solutions.
Note: The title image in the article is from the photo network and is based on the VRF protocol.