On the sixth day of the Lunar New Year, OpenAI released the "Wensheng**" tool, SORA. The AI technology revolution has once again shaken the whole world. Maybe you're starting to worry about AI being so fast that it's going to replace you. But remember, times of crisis are also times of change, and change is opportunity. After the start of work, I believe that most of my friends have already sat at their workstations, thinking hard about what to do this year in order to have a good result. Looking back, in the past few years, the general environment has changed from bullish to bearish, and everything has been done with half the effort. Looking ahead, the future is full of uncertainties, making most people bearish rather than bullish. There is an objective crisis, but is there really no opportunity? How can we be more self-sufficient?
01.Sora, to construct an alternative reality
If there is one sentence to describe the shock that SORA brings to people, it is:I didn't believe it was true before, and now I don't believe it is fake.
A year ago, the AI generated a Will Smith eating pasta. In an eerie, awkward pose, shovel pasta into a twitchy, non-human-like mouth.
As a result, the whole network is laughingAI is actually an artificial retardation.
The bigwigs have spoken one after another, and there is still a long way to go before AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) comes.
And just a year later, SORA came out, refuting the idea that AI was the way we thought a year ago, and AGI may be ahead of schedule.
So, what's so powerful about Sora? For example, enter the following text for sora:
A stylish lady wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress and black boots, and holds a black handbag as she confidently and casually walks down a street in Tokyo with warm lights, neon lights, and dynamic city signs. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. The streets are damp and reflective, and the colorful lights seem to create a mirror effect on the ground. Many pedestrians walk the streets.
sora：
Whether it is the freckles on the faces of the characters or the reflections in the water, they are extremely realistic. It makes people wonder, this is a real shot, right? It's not like it's AI-generated.
If the previous AI "Wensheng**" tool was "simulated reality", SORA is "building reality".
The difference between the two is that the former is an imitation of reality, and it is difficult to capture the physical rules and dynamic changes of the real world.
The latter is to construct another reality in the virtual world. It learns not only pixels and images, but also the "laws of physics" in the real world.
Here's an example. Every time we take a bite of food, there are bite marks on the food, which is a physical rule in the real world. The ** generated by the sora can be "bitten down and there are traces".
In the past, the AI Wensheng ** tool needs to be constantly tuned to produce a more realistic **. Otherwise, there will be an embarrassing scene like the one above where Will Smith eats pasta. That's where Sora comes inTo understand the physical world in motion, a universal "physical world simulator", that is, a "world model".
02.Five areas that will be impacted
Specifically, the following five areas will be the first to be disruptive by SORA.
Entertainment, film and television field
Originally, animation film and television companies made the millions of hairs, textures, clothes and other details of animals appear as real as real scenes in 3D modeling. It takes a lot of money and time to make it happen.
Today, Sora can be done automatically with just one line of description and a few prompts.
Originally, the traditional film and television industry had an extremely fine division of labor. From pre-production to post-production. From stage design, makeup, props to lighting, videography, photography, from actors, screenwriters, drama to animation special effects, any link that goes wrong may fall short.
And if AI ** continues to develop at the current rate, it is entirely possible to realize an idea to create a movie in the near future, saving the high cost.
It can be said that the creation of content such as games, movies, and animations will usher in subversive changes under the situation of rapid generation by the SORA model.
Educational Learning Areas
The impact on the field of learning in education can be broadly divided into two aspects.
On the one hand, many universities have opened majors such as film and television production, animation design, multi-design, digital art and so on.
The arrival of SORA may make students who have studied professional skills for four years less than a layman who knows how to command AI.
On the other hand, teachers can use the SORA model to transform text textbooks into vivid tutorials.
Improve students' interest and effectiveness in learning, provide personalized learning materials for special education groups, help them better integrate into society, and accelerate the universality and balance of education.
Advertising and marketing field
The SORA model can quickly generate engaging ads** that help brands stand out in a competitive marketplace while reducing production costs.
For example, we see that the advertising films of some brands are in the million-level in just a few minutes, while traditional advertising companies are basically in the millions.
The arrival of SORA will reduce the cost of the brand to an extreme. For advertising agencies, this may mean a direct change in business model.
News and social spheres
In the field of news and social networking, timeliness is important, that is, speed. If a hot event happens today, the day after tomorrow will not be called news, and there are usually three parts that affect the timeliness in this process: interview, editing, and broadcasting.
Using Sora to directly generate the picture can omit at least two of the links and ensure timeliness. For short**, self** and other social areas. To follow up on hot spots, you only need a single instruction to quickly generate relevant virtual ** content, which ensures timeliness and a certain amount of traffic.
On the other hand, SORA may pull in the creation cost of head creators and tail creators. We may be coming to an era where creativity and prowess compete. If practitioners lack creativity or distinctiveness, it will be difficult to cope with this wave.
The field of scientific research
SORA is a model built according to the rules of real physics, that is, it can simulate real physical phenomena to a certain extent. For example, in physics, chemistry, biology, and other fields, researchers can use SORA to create complex dynamic simulations that reproduce processes that are difficult to implement or observe under laboratory conditions. Virtualize and visualize scientific experiments.
03.Use your tools to face the waves
It has always been human nature to make good use of tools, from tinder to stone tools, from steam engines to electric technology, to last year's Chat GPT and now Sora.
We will find that there is always a combination of crisis and opportunity. What will the world look like in the future? What does the company of the future look like? What will the future look like? It's hard for us to **. But the development of AI technology has become turbulent and unstoppable.
In fact, as early as the emergence of ChatGPT, it has caused widespread controversy and discussion at home and abroad. In China, AI is widely used in education, entertainment and other industries, and the impact of AI on different fields and different groups of people should be considered in combination with the actual situation of the country.
Next, we share Tsinghua professor Qian Yingyi's article "Artificial Intelligence Will Wipe Out China's Educational Advantages" to help you understand more deeply.
04.Artificial intelligence has wiped out existing advantages
Chinese education has its own characteristics, and our strengths are implied in this characteristic. First of all, individuals, families, and society have a great investment in education, which is not only the investment of money and resources, but also the investment of students' and teachers' time.
This is determined by our cultural traditions, by the importance we place on education. Secondly, the teaching of knowledge points by teachers and the mastery of knowledge points by students are not only large in quantity, but also wide-ranging, so the mastery of basic knowledge by Chinese students is characterized by "high average". I think it may be more meaningful to reflect on the problems existing in education on the basis of understanding the strengths of China's education.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with Chinese education is that we have a systematic bias in education from cognition to practice, and this deviation is that we equate education with knowledge and limit it to knowledge. It is the job of teachers to impart knowledge, it is within the scope of students to learn knowledge, and the college entrance examination is also to test knowledge, so knowledge has become almost all the content of education. The phrase "knowledge is power" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, but can the education of innovative talents only rely on the accumulation of knowledge? My answer is no. Education must go beyond knowledge. This is one of my core ideas on the education of innovative talents, and it is also the starting point for our proposal for education reform.
Einstein. Einstein visited the United States for the first time after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, and a reporter asked him what the speed of his voice was, but Einstein refused to answer, saying that you can find the answer in any physics book.
Then he famously said, "The value of a university education is not to memorize many facts, but to train the brain to think." "Today, a lot of knowledge can be found on the Internet. In the future, there may be more knowledge machines that will help you find out. Therefore, Einstein's words are more worthy of our deep consideration at present and in the future. As we know, artificial intelligence works through deep learning by machines, and this learning process is to recognize and remember a large amount of existing knowledge.
In this case,It can replace or even surpass the human brain that has mastered knowledge through rote memorization and a large number of problems. And rote memorization and a lot of questions are exactly what we do in our students today.
So, one scenario that is likely to happen is:In the future, artificial intelligence will make the advantages of cultivating students in our education system unproductive. Not so long ago, artificial intelligence robots took the college entrance examination math exam. It was reported that there were two robots with scores of 134 and 105 points (out of 150).
And this is just the beginning, it is said that the goal of the AI robot is to be able to take all the college entrance exams by 2020. Therefore, economic development needs to be "driven by innovation", and the development momentum of artificial intelligence is strongAll this makes us realize the urgency of reforming the existing education system and methods.
05.More knowledge does not necessarily lead to greater creativity
I feel strongly in my teaching practiceOne of the things about creative thinking is curiosity and imagination.
Creativity does require the accumulation of knowledge, but what is needed other than knowledge? Albert Einstein said two things: "I have no special talents, I am just extremely curious" and "Imagination is more important than knowledge". He said curiosity and imagination, which I think we have neglected in the past.
Inspired by this, I propose a simple hypothesis: Creative Thinking = Knowledge Curiosity and Imagination. This simple formula tells us that more knowledge does not necessarily lead to greater creativity.
The more education a person receives, the more knowledge he accumulates, and the curiosity and imagination may decrease accordingly, so creativity does not increase with more time in education.
Why? Because the knowledge we learn later has a framework and a setting, no matter what kind of knowledge it is. When learning this knowledge, your curiosity and imagination often challenge these knowledge frameworks, and in the vast majority of cases, your challenges are wrong, so they are hit and denied, and objectively suppress your curiosity and imagination.
Even Albert Einstein once exclaimed: "It is a miracle that curiosity, imagination, can survive in formal education." ”
This creates a paradox in the education of innovative talents: more education helps to increase knowledge and increase creativity, and on the other hand, it reduces creativity by suppressing curiosity and imagination. The combination of the two makes it difficult to judge the role of education in creative talent, but it may partly explain why some dropouts are creative.
Therefore,It's not that our schools don't produce exceptional talent, it's that our schools increase students' knowledge while consciously or unconsciously reducing other elements necessary for creativity.
06.Utilitarianism stifles creative thinking
Creative thinking is not only about curiosity and imagination, but also about value orientation, so when we talk about innovative talent education, it is not only a question of knowledge and ability, but also a question of values.
We are now facing a society that is relatively eager for quick success, and the value orientation of short-term utilitarianism prevails, which is very harmful to creative thinking. Not long ago, Zuckerberg's speech at Harvard University's 2017 graduation ceremony was about the need for people to pursue and pursue higher, that is, to transcend the short-term utilitarian value orientation.
I divide the motivation for innovation into three levels, which represent three value orientations:
1. Short-term utilitarianism;
2. Long-term utilitarianism;
3. Non-utilitarianism of intrinsic value.
For short-term utilitarians, innovation is for the sake of literature, patenting, and listing; For long-term utilitarians, innovation has a higher pursuit, in order to fill the gap, strive for domestic first-class, and create world-class; For the non-utilitarian with intrinsic value, innovation has a higher pursuit: the pursuit of truth, the change of the world, and the making of people happier.
Our reality is that there are many people with the first type of motivation, and there are also people with the second type of motivation, but there are few, if not very few, people with the third type of motivation. Therefore, the reason why we lack innovative talents, in addition to the lack of curiosity and imagination, is that we are too eager for quick success and too utilitarian in our value orientation.
The mentality of rushing for success and the values of success and defeat lead to more plagiarism and copying, and less real innovation, and it is less likely that disruptive innovation and revolutionary innovation will occur.
07.Reform is not easy, but change is encouraging
Based on the above reflections, I believe that the education of innovative talents requires an innovative education model. I have three suggestions:
FirstEducation should create more relaxed space and time that is conducive to the development of students' personalities;
SecondIn education, it is necessary to better protect students' curiosity and stimulate students' imagination;
ThirdIn education, it is necessary to guide students to have a higher pursuit of value orientation and avoid short-term utilitarianism.
This puts forward higher requirements for education reform. Because the current design of student training programs is mostly based on the depth and breadth of students' mastery of knowledge as the starting point and assessment point, I always feel that students do not learn enough and deep enough, and what they learn is not practical and cutting-edge enough. But if we care more about students' curiosity and imagination, and pay more attention to students' value orientation, then our education model should be greatly changed.
In practice, I have also realized that reform is not easy, and traditional concepts, market pressure, and the social environment are all constraints. However, the focus on students' curiosity and imagination is increasingly resonating in society; The development of students' personalities has also been raised to higher and higher heights. These are encouraging changes. Therefore, I believe that with the further development of China's economy and the increase in the demand for innovative talents in society, the education of innovative talents will undergo profound changes.