Chapter 174 Yuan Guang, please tell me what to do
“First, I want to talk about why this is a technological revolution.

America has always been accustomed to exaggerating in the media that artificial intelligence is the technological singularity of the future. After this technological singularity is realized, the countries that master artificial intelligence technology will have an unbridgeable gap with the countries that do not.

At the same time, artificial intelligence replacing labor will help developed countries with expensive labor to return manufacturing, which will in turn hit our country's manufacturing industry.

It is for this reason that while America has high hopes for artificial intelligence, it is also trying every possible way to combat the development of our artificial intelligence technology and is pursuing and blocking it from all aspects, with chips being the core of their pursuit and blockade.

This is the core logic of the strategy that America has built over the past few years. They need to rely on AI to maintain or even expand their technological advantages, to achieve the return of manufacturing industries, to get rid of their dependence on China's manufacturing industry, and to get the whole world rid of its dependence on China's manufacturing industry.

This is also what we fear, because honestly speaking, our natural resource endowment is not that good. If we are forced to lose the global market, we will be in a very difficult situation.

So is their strategy feasible? Are we currently in the stage of a technological revolution, and is the technological revolution the same as what American defines?
What I am going to say next is based on my perspective and some of my own thoughts. I hope it can be of some reference to you. "

Chen Yuanguang hesitated for a very long time when choosing the topic, because the future is a parallel time and space, which is not completely consistent with the modern time and space. This also means that you cannot draw on key historical nodes for warning. Of course, even if they are exactly the same, Chen Yuanguang would not talk about these.

It is appropriate to limit the lecture content to the history of technological development.

Regarding the transition from the steam age to the electrical age, some science fiction writers have written that if humans had not discovered electricity, they would have developed complex and cumbersome steam engines and created a steampunk era, but this is impossible in the real world.

Because the observability of electricity determines that people will sooner or later discover the advantages of electricity and enter the electrical age, the only difference is when.

The time required for technological development will vary, and choosing the right path will accelerate this process. There will be differences in details, but the fundamental evolutionary process is the same.

“I agree that we are in the early stages of this technological revolution.

It is not only AI that can accelerate the progress of scientific research. Internet technology, modern transportation systems, communication systems, etc. have accelerated communication between scientists, knowledge sharing, and reduced the cost of trial and error.

These have all accelerated the progress of scientific research, but because the problems of modern scientific research are becoming more and more difficult and more and more subdivided, the important problems that are easy for the public to understand have been almost solved by predecessors, and there are various things that attract people's attention, making it difficult for scientists to break the circle through scientific research achievements.

Since the discovery of the Internet, people have achieved a large number of results in many fields. Our lives have been changed unprecedentedly, and the speed of this change is even accelerating.

We are now in the early stages of this round of technological revolution, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I believe that the core of this technological revolution is definitely not just artificial intelligence.

If the core of the first round of technological revolution was the steam engine, the second round was electricity, and the third round was computer technology, then the fourth round will obviously be more diversified.

It can also be seen from the process of technological development that the core of the steam engine revolves around steam. It is nothing more than different forms of steam in different application scenarios. When steam is used in trains, it is a steam train; when it is used in ships, it is a steam ship; and in textiles, it is a steam textile machine.

As for electricity, its model is much broader. In addition to electricity itself, there are also batteries, petrochemical industry, etc. It has more technological breakthroughs.

There are even more in the third round, including chips, networks, software, etc., and in the fourth round it is impossible that there is only artificial intelligence technology.

The Americans exaggerate the importance of artificial intelligence technology. In a sense, this is a strategic deception plan that they have constructed in the new era from Washington to Wall Street based on their own needs.

They deceive themselves first, but some entrepreneurs will inadvertently reveal some truth when being interviewed.

Breakthroughs in energy and basic materials are the cornerstones of AI breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in optical chip technology are not enough. Even if the computing power of Nvidia chips is increased tenfold, if the network connections between chips are not interconnected with materials with lower latency, it will still not achieve the advertised effect.

This process will be very long and will require a lot of supporting technologies to achieve breakthroughs. I think this is not actually the era of artificial intelligence, but the space age. People are truly stepping out of the earth and making large-scale use of space resources.

Artificial intelligence is just one important chapter in that.”

After Chen Yuanguang finished speaking, the bigwigs nodded frequently. Having a top scientist come to the conclusion undoubtedly made them feel more at ease.

Everyone knows that there is a technological gap between China and America, and it is a not small gap.

Everyone now understands more clearly why Chen Yuanguang has always wanted to work on projects like space mining. This is his unity of knowledge and action.

"Room-temperature superconductivity, robotics, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, supercomputers, nuclear fusion, clean energy, etc., these will all be key points. America may be able to lead in some areas, but it is impossible to lead in all areas.

Similarly, for us, we are currently in a leading position in room-temperature superconductivity and clean energy, and have achieved a certain degree of breakthrough in semiconductors. Topological semimetals are a very important technology, and we can rely on this technology to force some foreign countries to cooperate with us.

Nikon, the former leader in the field of lithography machines, is a Japanese company. They have already contacted us privately and are eager for cooperation.

As for photolithography machines, China is still some distance away from being able to produce 28nm domestically.

If we cooperate with Nikon, we can quickly break through the 5nm process of topological semimetals. If the 5nm of topological semimetals is equivalent to silicon, it is equivalent to a direct breakthrough of 1nm. We can use a smaller unit of pm to describe it. It is difficult to say how many pm it is equivalent to, because Western countries that make silicon themselves dare not think about what the chip computing power will be after pm.

These are our advantages because it is difficult for us to achieve breakthroughs in all areas.

As mentioned earlier, there are more and more sub-fields of modern science, and the work done by scientists is becoming more and more specific.

There are so many sub-sectors and resources are limited. Today, if you want to conduct independent research and breakthroughs in all fields, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible.

America can't do it, and neither can we.

We may be able to do it in the future, but we can't do it now.

Essentially, this is also determined by productivity. Productivity determines that we can only train a certain percentage of people to become scientific researchers. This number is very limited, which in turn determines that the resources we invest in R&D are limited. The scientific researchers here can be researchers from universities, research institutes, academic organizations, or corporate researchers. In many cases, the combat effectiveness of corporate researchers is even stronger.

Therefore, if we want to gain advantages in this round of technological revolution, we need to invest resources in the research and development of key technologies.

Relying on breakthroughs in key technology research and development to control the development of the entire industrial chain."

Chen Yuanguang felt it necessary to give some examples to illustrate this idea.

"Let's talk about lithography machines. I think everyone should be most familiar with them."

Everyone present smiled, and it was obvious that lithography machines had been frequently used on Neican for a long time.

For example, the Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund that was urgently established that year, which is the big fund rumored in the market, left a deep impression on the bigwigs. The first phase raised more than 100 billion yuan, and the second phase raised nearly 300 billion yuan. The two phases combined exceeded 400 billion yuan, and the social capital indirectly leveraged exceeded one trillion yuan.

More importantly, most of the fund’s early executives were included.

A certain big shot once used this as a typical case.

“If we go back to the millennium and have a chance to start over again, it would be almost unrealistic to develop lithography machines for the entire industry chain.

Companies like Zeiss and Cymer, the former makes lenses and the latter makes light sources, it is impossible to buy them.

And we can choose to control the most critical technologies, such as light source.

If we cannot control the entire supply chain upstream and downstream, then we should concentrate resources on the light source. This will ensure that other countries will not be able to produce lithography machines without us.

America can make companies from other countries compromise, require them to cooperate, listen to them, and relocate their companies to America.

But they can't ask that of us.

In a large number of fields, we will concentrate resources to tackle key technologies and then apply them on a large scale to achieve overtaking in the field of technology.

Perovskite has now achieved results. Because perovskite is a very hot field, after we took the lead in achieving large-scale industrialization, foreign photovoltaic companies have not given up on the research of perovskite batteries.

They even achieved some breakthroughs in industrial mass production, but it was useless because their technology was not as good as ours, either in terms of yield rate or photoelectric conversion efficiency.

Simply put, due to the technological gap, investing 100 yuan in foreign-developed perovskite will only generate 1 yuan in profit, while using China's technology, investing 100 yuan can generate 6 yuan in profit.

This gap is still widening as China's mass production continues, forcing foreign companies to give up.

Once we master the perovskite technology, we will have the initiative in the photovoltaic industry. America will have to give the green light to China's perovskite technology and allow us to import it urgently.

This is the benefit of mastering key technologies. We can be deeply embedded in the global industry after the future technological revolution, and even because our technology is key technology, we can get a bigger piece of the pie.

This is the end of my lecture. Thank you for your time. Now we will have a Q&A session. You are welcome to ask questions. "

After Chen Yuanguang finished speaking, there was warm applause and the bosses were very respectful.

"Yuan Guang, you put it very well. We are all old. Although many of us have a background in science and engineering, we cannot compare with you in our understanding of cutting-edge technology.

So I still have some questions for you.

That is the key technological breakthrough you just mentioned. As I understand it, the more critical the technology, the more difficult it is to develop?"

"Generally speaking, this is the case." Chen Yuanguang nodded.

"According to my understanding, the current scientific research environment is actually based on papers. Only those with papers can be evaluated as professors or various titles. If scholars do similar cutting-edge research on key technologies, they are naturally weaker in terms of obtaining material conditions than their peers who work on simpler problems.

He may not achieve anything in his entire life, but his ability is better than other scholars. Other scholars who work on easy topics have better material conditions than these scholars.

In other words, our current scientific research evaluation system is not suitable for solving key problems.

However, if we get rid of the evaluation system that only focuses on papers, there will be problems. How can we judge who is more capable? Can we only rely on well-known experts in the same field to make a judgment on who is stronger and who is weaker?

So the former is the imperial examination system, and the latter is the selection of filial and honest people. The former is certainly problematic, and the latter is even more inappropriate. The academic clique itself has been criticized enough by young scholars.

What should we do to achieve the purpose you described and avoid the dilemma of subjective evaluation system? "

Chen Yuanguang felt a little overwhelmed by the questions. He didn't even personally get involved in corporate management. This kind of question involving the entire management system was a bit too difficult for him.

Now it really becomes "Ah, me?"

(End of this chapter)