Douyin also wants to build AI chips? Domestic AI chip company rankings

"Cross-border chip manufacturing" has become the norm in the current industry. Although it is extremely difficult to make chips, as long as there is enough strength, everything is possible. On May 25, according to Taiwan Business Times, Douyin, a subsidiary of ByteDance, is working with Taiwan Aegis to develop AI computing chips, mainly for hardware optimization of audio and video processing.

1. Douyin wants to build AI chips? outright denial by the parties

According to Taiwan media reports, the AI chip developed by Douyin and Aegis adopts TSMC’s 7nm process and is specially optimized for audio and video processing. It can improve performance and reduce power consumption, allowing ordinary smartphones to stably play 4K ultra-high-definition videos. , or record 60FPS video.

The news also said that this chip is expected to be mass-produced in early 2021 and is expected to be installed on OPPO smartphones for the first time. In addition to OPPO, many major smartphone manufacturers are also interested in introducing this AI chip.

The report in the original article is also very convincing, making readers really think that Douyin’s development of AI chips is true. In response to this news, Douyin also responded simply and neatly: "The information is false and there is no AI mobile phone chip developed."

2. There are already signs of AI chip plan?

Although there is no confirmation of Douyin's core production, Douyin's parent company ByteDance has already had signs of its AI chip layout. In 2018, Yang Zhen, vice president of ByteDance, once said, "ByteDance has the world's largest number of user-uploaded videos that need to be analyzed and processed, and has a large number of chip purchases and applications. At present, it is also actively seeking breakthroughs in chip-related fields."

It is reported that ByteDance made such a statement mainly due to the "ZTE embargo" incident at that time. The substantial impact of the U.S. Department of Commerce's embargo policy on ZTE has sounded the alarm that domestic core technologies are independently controllable.

As the world's largest and most highly valued unicorn company, although Bytedance's AI chip has not been seen for a long time, the strength of AI technology behind its own business is beyond doubt.

As we all know, Toutiao and Douyin are two representative works of ByteDance, and the most familiar one is the "algorithm + artificial content recommendation mechanism". The operation of these two products is closely related to AI technology, including content analysis, user tags, evaluation analysis, content security and other principles.

For ByteDance, which relied on AI algorithms to dominate information flow and short video content in the past, AI algorithms do represent advanced productivity, but pure algorithms are not omnipotent, and now they are in the huge information flow and short video content. In the market, ByteDance faces considerable competitive pressure.

However, in terms of AI chip layout, Internet giants such as BAT have already started this golden track by acquiring start-ups and establishing subsidiaries for independent research and development. How to further implement AI technology, realize commercial applications, and keep up with BAT may be a major direction for ByteDance to seek breakthroughs.

3. There are tens of thousands of roads, and the nuclear "core" is the first

Whether the core of AI chips lies in "AI" or "chips" has always been a controversial topic. If I have to choose one as the core, I think the focus is still on the "chip".

As early as July 8, 2017, the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" issued and implemented at the national level proposed that the R&D and deployment of key common technologies of the new generation of artificial intelligence should focus on the urgent need to enhance my country's international competitiveness in artificial intelligence. Based on data and hardware, focus on breakthroughs in high-efficiency, reconfigurable brain-inspired computing chips and brain-inspired visual sensor technologies with computational imaging functions, and develop high-efficiency brain-inspired neural network architectures and hardware systems with autonomous learning capabilities to achieve A brain-like intelligent system for multimedia perception information understanding, intelligence growth, and common sense reasoning capabilities.

Today's AI is actually a software program that requires massive amounts of data to perform massive calculations, and the chip becomes the carrier for such huge calculations. When faced with different scene requirements, various types of hardware are needed for support, such as sound chips for speech recognition, visual chips for image recognition, optical chips for fingerprint recognition, and so on.

In most current AI scenarios, people usually use existing general-purpose chips suitable for parallel computing such as GPUs and FPGAs to implement AI algorithms. With the increase in data volume and the continuous expansion of AI application scale, the limitations of general-purpose chips It is becoming more and more obvious, so special chips for deep learning algorithms and new brain-inspired computing chips have been derived.

4. Who are the top AI chip players in China?

Although there is still a relatively large gap between domestic and foreign companies such as AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and IBM in the development of the AI chip industry, there are also some companies that have made achievements in the professional field. Specifically, they are:

HiSilicon Semiconductor

On the road of smart security, Texas Instruments, the former leader in security chips, adopted the ARM+DSP architecture, and then the emerging Hisilicon Semiconductor adopted the ARM+IVE architecture. The full name of IVE is Intelligent Video Engine (Intelligent Video Engine). Co-processor, HiSilicon has become the leader in the domestic smart security market with its high cost performance;

Cloudwalk Technology

Incubated from the Chongqing Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it participated in the formulation of artificial intelligence national standards and industry standards, and became the first artificial intelligence technology enterprise to simultaneously undertake the construction tasks of national major projects such as the National Development and Reform Commission's artificial intelligence basic platform and application platform, and the chip platform of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The first "3D structured light face recognition technology" in China; the first commercial cross-mirror tracking (Re-ID) technology, allowing computer vision to enter the era of "recognition of people" from "scanning faces"; human body 3D reconstruction technology speeds up the algorithm by 20 times, And the accuracy rate has been greatly improved by 30%.

Horizon

The company focuses on the field of autonomous driving chips, and its partners include Audi, Bosch, Changan, BYD, SAIC, GAC, etc. Based on the innovative AI-specific computing architecture BPU (Brain Processing Unit), Horizon has successfully taped out and mass-produced China's first edge AI processing?--the "Journey" series processing focused on intelligent driving? and focusing on AIoT’s “Sunrise” series of processors has been commercialized on a large scale.

Cambrian Period

A pioneer in the field of global smart chips, its mission is to create core processor chips for various smart cloud servers, smart terminals and smart robots. Its well-known chip products include the terminal intelligent processor IPCambricon series, intelligent accelerator Casiyuan 100/270 series, edge computing module Siyuan 220 series and so on.

Think deeply

Focusing on the field of brain-inspired artificial intelligence and deep learning, the company deeply optimizes deep learning technology at the algorithm level and chip level, and provides unique deep learning chip solutions. The representative technology is "Multi-modal deep semantic understanding engine (iDeepwise.ai) technology", which can simultaneously understand the deep semantics behind multi-modal unstructured data such as text and visual images. Among them, machine reading comprehension technology for long texts, Free cross-domain multi-round human-computer dialogue technology and semantic understanding technology for multiple modal information are the most prominent technical advantages of Deep Thinking, and it is a leader in the industry in the field of artificial intelligence semantic understanding.

Yuntian Lifei

Yuntian Lifei uses AI technology to structure the physical world and create digital twin cities. It owns Yuntian "Chuxin", an end- and edge-side neural network processor chip for visual applications, with independent intellectual property instruction sets, multi-core neural network processors, heterogeneous parallel computing architecture, and hardware intelligent operator engines.

Yunzhisheng

Yunzhisheng focuses on IoT artificial intelligence services. It is an artificial intelligence company with completely independent intellectual property rights and the world's top intelligent voice technology. The company has built multi-modal artificial intelligence hard core technologies such as speech perception, cognition and expression, supercomputing platform and image, and machine translation, and encapsulated these capabilities on self-developed AI chips, through "cloud core" integrated products The system introduces full-stack AI technology capabilities for the industry, creating an ecological closed loop from AI technology innovation to industrial application.