Chapter 234 The Tower of Babel in the Internet Age

Hornbill is a recent iconic product of the global Internet. 500 million users is not a lot, but it is definitely not a lot for a product that is determined to beat Google.

However, due to its unique technical advantages and product features, Hornbill has received a lot of attention in the industry. Countless eyes in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun are staring at Hornbill, wanting to see what it wants to achieve and what it can achieve.

As Baidu's chief technology officer, Wang Haifeng saw the potential of Hornbill since its inception and was also the representative figure who led the acquisition of Hornbill within Baidu.

After Hornbill made the first update, he paid Hornbill $4.99 without hesitation using his UnionPay credit card issued overseas.

Like his colleagues at Google, he wanted to see why the service, called Global Connect, dared to charge fees.

It is not surprising that question-answering artificial intelligence is charged. Both ChatGPT abroad and Wenxin Yiyan in China charge fees, but it is the first time in history that a search engine charges fees.

Therefore, just from the fact that Hornbill charges, Wang Haifeng realized that Alpha Technology was operating Hornbill as an artificial intelligence.

The regular version attracts customers, while the upgraded version generates profits.

But think about it, it makes sense, it's a simple logic, search engines and artificial intelligence both require massive infrastructure, computing power, storage chips, electricity and so on.

Either rely on advertising or rely on user payments.

Search engines rely on the former, and question-answering artificial intelligence relies on the latter. However, no matter how high the price you set for the latter, you will not be able to recover your investment.

ChatGPT has set its price at $25 per month, and it is not profitable even with 60 paying users. Wang Haifeng is not optimistic that Alpha Technology can make a profit by selling memberships.

“If they launch paid features now, the price is estimated to be less than one-third of the cost. After all, they received $50 billion in H300 from Goldman Sachs, which is the same amount that Microsoft buys in a year.

With a monthly membership of $5, even if ChatGPT takes over the entire market, it will not be able to make back its investment.

Not to mention that the giants of question-answering artificial intelligence are now free, and ChatGPT has opened all its functions for free. Alpha probably just wants to promote it in this way.

Cultivate users' awareness of payment." Wang Haifeng thought as he completed the payment.

"Global Communication builds bridges across language islands."

According to the introduction in the language you choose, Wang Haifeng chose Chinese, and the introduction of Global Pass members is just this one sentence in bold font.

After seeing this sentence, Wang Haifeng realized what kind of service Hornbill was going to provide.

It is clearly a search engine service that provides translation-like services.

Because you have to know that there are more than just China and America in the world.

The world is diverse. There are nearly 200 countries in the world, and these countries and regions have diverse cultures and languages.

Chinese and English are undoubtedly the two most widely spoken languages ​​in the world. Together, these two languages ​​account for more than 40% of the entire Internet, and this proportion is still increasing.

Many scholars even pessimistically predict that in the future the only two global languages ​​will be Chinese and English, and other languages ​​will disappear over time.

Chen Yuanguang witnessed this future with his own eyes. Four hundred years later, even languages ​​like Spanish and Arabic, which are not considered niche in the 21st century, have disappeared.

At present, we can see some signs just from the integration of 4v people into the simplified Chinese Internet.

You should know that 4v uses traditional Chinese, but due to the small population, there is too little content produced on the island's Internet. Compared with their own Internet, the simplified Chinese Internet has much more interesting content.

The content produced by 2000 million people can never be compared with the content produced by 14 billion people.

As a result, a large number of 4v young people rushed to the simplified Chinese Internet to play, and the Matthew effect was infinitely magnified.

Similarly, users from other minority language countries are constantly being siphoned away by the English Internet.

The same is true in the field of search engines. If you search for content in a minority language, the content it can provide may not even be as good as if you searched for the same content in English.

For example, for French historical figures, the English page shows higher content richness and information density than the French page.

This is the current situation and also the tragedy of small languages.

This is also why more and more young people abroad, even if your native language is not English and you did not receive English education, you can speak some English.

After Wang Haifeng read the introduction on the Hornbill page, his guess was confirmed.

That’s right, Hornbill will present more diverse content for the content you search and help you analyze it.

"Let me search for SpaceX and see." Wang Haifeng typed in the text box:
SpaceX
He has discovered in the past that Hornbill does not need to be in a question-and-answer format. You can use it as a search engine's text box. Just enter the content you want to know, and it will naturally give you a response.

It just means that if you think of it as a conversational AI, the more content you input, the more accurately it will understand.

SpaceX is a .
Just like before, there is a long introduction about SpaceX, followed by some recent progress made by SpaceX. On the recommendation page, the page that appears is in Chinese, although the introduction is in Chinese and it is also in Chinese when you click on it.

But after Wang Haifeng clicked in, he realized that the style of these pages was definitely not Chinese, but was obviously the style of pages from foreign news websites.

Because the layout of domestic websites is generally compact and mainly text-based, while foreign websites focus more on the display of pictures and videos.

Especially when a large cookie permission pops up after clicking on the page, it is a style that domestic news websites will not have. Domestic websites will at most pop up a window asking you to register as a member.

After Wang Haifeng opened the page with a ladder, he found that it was indeed an English page. Combining the content, he found that Hornbill had translated the page, and the accuracy of the translation was more accurate than the translation function built into ordinary browsers.

Wang Haifeng was a little dazed for a moment. He realized that just for such services, a large number of users would abandon Baidu.

When using Baidu to search for foreign-related content, apart from Baidu Encyclopedia, which has some value, the entire page is filled with spam from other Baijia accounts.

For users, instead of reading the same old content that has been chewed over by editors, I would rather look directly at the foreign pages.

At $5, it's not cheap, but it's nothing for its target user group.

What Wang Haifeng wanted to know more was that Hornbill's response speed was too fast.

Because it is equivalent to translating the Chinese and English pages and integrating them together for display, the response speed is also in milliseconds.

This is not normal, and it can only be achieved through innovation in the underlying algorithms.

"France and Light Armor Aerospace's Space Station Project"

Wang Haifeng changed another content, because this content involves French, Chinese and English. As he expected, Hornbill recommended Chinese pages, French pages and English pages. All of them have been translated, and you can directly read the cooked meat of the content.

"This is definitely comparable to the breakthrough of deep learning network in 2012." Wang Haifeng's face became redder and redder.

"Robin, Alpha Technology has come up with something amazing. Before, I only suspected that they had achieved innovation at the underlying algorithm level, but this time I am sure of it.

This will be no less innovative than Alex's innovation!" Wang Haifeng called Li Yanhong almost immediately.

In the past, Stanford held the ImageNet competition every year, which was meant to let machines recognize pictures. In 12, the shocking "ImageNet moment" brought about by deep neural networks represented by AlexNet made the development of AI leap forward.

In that competition, other competitors used a lot of resources and a lot of graphics cards, but Alex's team only used two old graphics cards, but was far ahead of the second place in the final recognition accuracy.

Since then, deep learning and convolutional neural networks have leapt from niche fields to the most mainstream strategies in the field of artificial intelligence.

After listening to Wang Haifeng's brief description, Robin Li understood the value of Hornbill.

What Wang Haifeng read about was technological innovation, while Li Yanhong realized the huge commercial value.

“Is it possible for AlphaTech to hold an auction like Hinton did?” Li Yanhong said with a wry smile, “I’m afraid Samad is not short of money.

There's no way it could sell Hornbill to us for $4400 million.

Even if this number is multiplied by 10, they probably won't even look at it.

Two billion US dollars. The license I give you is two billion US dollars. Any amount below two billion US dollars to buy Hornbill is acceptable.

Ten billion is really too expensive.”

After Alex became famous in the ImageNet competition, Baidu was the first technology giant to contact them, offering an annual salary of 1200 million US dollars.

As a result, Alex and his teacher Hinton founded a company together, and they planned to sell the company to technology giants.

The method they chose was to have the technology giants bid in a luxury hotel, with each round of bidding no less than $100 million. When Google raised the price to $4400 million, they took the initiative to stop and chose to accept this price.

Wang Haifeng wanted to say something, but Li Yanhong didn't wait for him to say anything and continued:

“Haifeng, I know its value, but I don’t know if you have seen the risks it contains.

After we bought Hornbill, it contained huge risks. The White House would treat Hornbill like the short video platform.

The White House will even build a GFW on the American Internet to prevent American users from using Hornbill.

To be precise, not even, but definitely.

So it only has technical value and its commercial value is almost zero.

The White House will not allow Americans to use Hornbill to open their eyes to the world.

Think about it carefully, and when you have figured it out, prepare to go to Malaysia.

I even think that $20 billion is a risk. We are taking a gamble. If it can enter the European market and compete with Google, I think the price is worth it.

If the White House not only does not allow Americans to use Hornbill, but also does not allow allied countries to use Hornbill, without Western Europe and Japan and South Korea, then its value will be limited.

However, considering that Baidu is now in a bottleneck period, we can take a gamble. Even if we lose, it will not cause any serious consequences.

But in China, do you think this kind of application will really be allowed?

Because you searched for English pages using Hornbill, does it mean that pages that use the Hornbill channel are special cases and will not be blocked?

If Hornbill's global communication function is castrated, what are its advantages?

Therefore, it is highly likely that Hornbill will become a special application for some minority language countries in the world in the future. From this perspective, its upper limit of value is 20 billion US dollars, including commercial value and technical value, which is a maximum of 20 billion US dollars.”

After listening to this, Wang Haifeng realized that Li Yanhong had thought very maturely, so he didn't say anything more: "Okay, I'll ask my secretary to book a flight to Malaysia for me."

For a long time in the past, the English Internet was the English Internet, and the Chinese Internet was the Chinese Internet. The two sides were like two ecosystems that didn't want to interfere with each other.

Although there will be various porters who transport products from other ecosystems to this ecosystem to strengthen mutual exchanges, this kind of transportation is extremely rare and cannot bring about any fundamental changes in the ecosystem.

As for the Internet ecosystems of other languages, they are slowly integrating into these two ecosystems.

Hornbill's global membership can help residents of one ecosystem see the full picture of the entire "Earth".

In other words, when Americans search for China-related content on Hornbill, they can see Chinese web pages instead of the illusions created by BBC, CNN, and FOX. They can also see content from Chinese media instead of content taken out of context by American media.

Similarly, when Chinese people search for news related to America, they can also directly see the original content, rather than the content that has been artificially chewed and "translated".

Maybe sometimes, America and China are the same in not wanting you to see the real content.

"Hornbill Babel"

This is the number one trending term on Twitter in the United States.

There is no doubt that after the launch of the Hornbill global communication function, it quickly became popular throughout the United States. The ban on TK itself caused dissatisfaction among many American people, and a large number of China-related travel videos and China electric vehicle review videos on YouTube continued to be popular.

Now there are new tools to circumvent the information cocoons created by American media, which are spreading rapidly among young people in America.

In addition, Hornbill’s founder Samad is a top figure in the cryptocurrency circle, which led to Hornbill’s influence beginning to spread beyond the circle after the launch of the Global Pass membership.

On the Internet, when the first person compared Hornbill to the Tower of Babel of the Internet age, eliminating the language barriers between different races, it was later recognized by the majority of netizens.

"It's the first time I've found web pages from other countries to be so interesting. Hornbill will even explain to you the sources of their unique jokes."

“Perhaps there are also reports that distort the facts in foreign media, but when you read reports that distort the facts from different perspectives, it is better than just reading reports that distort the facts from one side.”

"Stop talking, brother. I've had enough of CNN, BBC, FOX and other media outlets that are full of lies and distortions. With Hornbill, I no longer have to read their reports that distort the facts when searching for content related to China.

The reports from YouTube bloggers are certainly positive, but they are too personal. On the contrary, the reports from Chinese media fill in the gaps in macro data that are difficult for individuals to access.”

(End of this chapter)