Recently, a number of Weibo V broke the news that Meitu, which is active in the FIELD of AI, is about to enter the blockchain. Although Meitu has not responded directly, but from the micro blog of meitu block chain engineer recruitment advertisement, I think this is nine times out of ten true.
In fact, CAI Wensheng, chairman of Meitu, has been paying attention to blockchain technology for a long time and has done a lot of research. In early December 2017, Meitu Chairman CAI Wensheng shared his views on blockchain technology at the “Internet plus” Innovation and Entrepreneurship Festival in Hainan. CAI Proposed: “The core of blockchain economy is not technology, but the reconstruction of business logic. So it’s not just a technological revolution, it’s a cognitive revolution.” Earlier, CAI wensheng, Shi Yuzhu and Tang Yue jointly invested in Bitcoin exchange platform OKEX, and in October 2017, OKEX announced that it would gradually transform into a blockchain application and development company. From CAI wensheng’s layout of block chain, Meitu’s entry into block chain is also natural.
In my opinion, if Meitu really layout blockchain technology, it is more likely to choose to combine with the company’s existing technology and business. AI is what Meitu has done most recently. The AI technology of Meitu layout “blossomed” in 2017, including “AI Skin Testing” and the extended “Meitu Beauty makeup” e-commerce platform. Therefore, I dare to guess that once Meitu sets foot in blockchain technology, it is likely to combine with its AI technology to create new sparks.
Blockchain is more than just bitcoin
For blockchain technology itself, the public’s perception seems to remain “bitcoin”. The bitcoin craze last year also brought a lot of visibility to blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin. In essence, blockchain technology is a distributed shared accounting technology. By establishing a group of public accounts on the Internet, all users in the network jointly record and check accounts on the accounts to ensure the authenticity and imtamability of information.
In fact, in the field of Internet technology, blockchain technology has been extended to all aspects, bitcoin is only one of the most well-known application scenarios. For example, earlier this year, Ant Financial, JD.com, Tencent and Baidu have started to use blockchain technology. In April this year, Tencent launched its “public welfare human search chain” with blockchain. Meanwhile, Tencent and Intel have cooperated to develop a blockchain-based Internet of Things system.
The most typical case is JINGdong’s blockchain anti-counterfeiting traceability open platform, which uses the characteristics of blockchain such as data imtamability and the existence proof of time stamps to realize the traceability of goods and eradicate the counterfeit and shoddy problems in the process of product flow in the supply chain. Block chain is essentially the top supply chain data records of a “book”, jingdong provides a data platform, and each brands even commodities can be recorded in the “book”, the user can sweep in the jingdong mall APP code check the traceability information of related products, such as beef breeding, feed ingredients, date of slaughter and processing and transport enterprises information, etc.
According to McKinsey’s Blockchain Utility Roadmap, 2017-2020 will be the time when blockchain technology infrastructure takes shape. At present, the world’s major investment banks and technology companies have accelerated their layout in the blockchain. The advantages of “decentralization” of blockchain will be applied to finance, insurance, medical care, education and other life scenes, and will set off great changes in the industry.
AI on the left and blockchain on the right
AI and blockchain technologies seem to have no intersection, but in recent years, there has been more and more discussion about the convergence of the two technologies, and many companies have even begun to explore the integration of blockchain technology and AI. IBM announced its own early blockchain project back in 2015 and has been working on integrating Watson ARTIFICIAL intelligence with blockchain technology ever since. By 2016, IBM’s internal blockchain team was simply reorganized into a new division that included the AI business.
In fact, the advantages of blockchain technology itself will further tap the potential of artificial intelligence.
If did not have the big data, AI like a body without soul, which makes the author think of the hkust fly, hkust fly with many years of accumulation of data, make its intelligent speech recognition and a big step, the same, AlphaGo overcome many international well-known go pro, get is also through the analysis of large data, the result of deep learning, Therefore, it is not difficult to see that the optimization of ARTIFICIAL intelligence relies most on the support of a large amount of data, and it can improve its ability by collecting and learning massive data. However, at present, data islands limit the huge explosive potential of the combination of the two.
We can use the management “wine and sewage” example, meaning that a spoonful of wine into a bucket of sewage, get a bucket of sewage; Pour a spoonful of dirty water into a cask of wine and you get a cask of dirty water. In a completely decentralized system, the loss of a node or the entry of a bad node is likely to destroy or destroy the existing system, because the entry of a bad node will destroy the trust mechanism, and the worst result will be a chain reaction leading to a vicious cycle of platform “collapse”.
In the case of blockchain, the existence of such a “crash” is zero, because the “ledger” of each node is validated and validated throughout the network. This is the nature of decentralized/shared control of blockchain. After the block chain with AI, each training result of artificial intelligence, no matter right and wrong will share each other, this means that the use of block chain technology, artificial intelligence, will upgrade the old data, into a better model, at the same time also can bring more new data, create a new model, this undoubtedly improve the credibility of the artificial intelligence training.
Meitu bet on AI, layout of blockchain
As early as 2010, Meitu has already established MTlab (Meitu Image Lab), which has started to explore AI on the basis of the rich data accumulated by face recognition/image enhancement /AR technology /3D technology. In recent years, it has been making frequent movements, and just released its latest research result — AI skin measurement technology MTskin. At present, the accuracy rate of Meitu AI has reached more than 95% in the five areas of skin quality, skin age, skin color, black head, dark circles under the eyes and acne.
When blockchain technology meets AI, what sparks will be generated for Meitu? In the author’s opinion, meitu’s possible transformation by adopting blockchain is in two aspects. One is that the feature of “decentralized ARTIFICIAL intelligence” is combined with beauty makeup and skin data, so as to have a definite target in the beauty makeup data market. Second, data traceability to ensure authenticity for beauty e-commerce. Through blockchain technology, trading links and paths can be effectively controlled and tracked to prevent fake goods and swap.
From the technical point of view, the decentralized and shared control characteristics of blockchain technology can also make the data more accurate, and at the same time, it will also bring more innovative models to Meitu. This will undoubtedly provide strong technical support for Meitu’s beauty makeup field and skin detection, and also improve the accuracy of AI algorithm in the information flow advertising field of product matrix, so as to bring new changes to the beauty market of hundreds of billions of yuan. At that time, meitu is more than 400 million monthly active users, the huge data flow combined with artificial intelligence algorithm, the real business value will be demonstrated.
Blockchain may optimize existing models in various industries
Whether BAT or An Internet company like Meitu, blockchain technology is bound to change and optimize the company’s existing model from two dimensions of industry and business. In fact, every company has its own development track, and blockchain is to help the company speed up on this track.
At the industry level, blockchain + various industries, such as government, finance, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, supply chain, trade, medical care, copyright, Internet of Things and so on, truly realize the gradual evolution from consumption interconnection to value interconnection.
At the business level, we take The products and technologies of Meitu as an example. As mentioned above, the addition of blockchain technology can not only optimize the data structure of existing ARTIFICIAL intelligence, but also obtain more accurate test results at the product level.
At the same time, for companies like Meitu, blockchain is applicable to a variety of scenarios, which can be naturally integrated into meitu’s product business, such as optimizing the transaction system and virtual currency system of the existing short video community Meitu, motivating users to generate content through the Token of blockchain, and enhancing the stickiness of the community.
As the underlying technology, blockchain can provide standardized and immutable data sources for AI and big data analysis. At the same time, as a shared ledger, blockchain can also break through data islands of different subjects and integrate industrial chain data, which is also the core advantage of blockchain companies.
Liu Kuang, meditation on the Internet, wechat official account: Liukuang110