Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji CEO Wang Xiangdong: In the future, AI will become the "coal, water and electricity" of the education industry | WISE2024 King of Business

The environment is constantly changing, and the times are always evolving. The "Business Kings" follow the trend of the times, insist on creating, and seek new driving forces. Based on the current great transformation of the Chinese economy, the WISE2024 Business Kings Conference will jointly discover the truly resilient "Business Kings" and explore the "right things" in the Chinese business wave.

From November 28 to 29, the two-day 36Kr WISE2024 Business Kings Conference was grandly held in Beijing. As an all-star event in the Chinese business field, the WISE Conference is already in its twelfth session this year, witnessing the resilience and potential of Chinese business in an ever-changing era.

2024 is a year that is somewhat ambiguous and has more changes than stability. Compared with the past ten years, people's pace is slowing down, and development is more rational. 2024 is also a year to seek new economic momentum, and new industrial changes have put forward higher requirements for the adaptability of each subject. This year's WISE Conference takes Hard But Right Thing as the theme. In 2024, what is the right thing has become a topic we want to discuss more.

In the afternoon of the 28th, Wang Xiangdong, Vice President of Yuanfudao Group and CEO of Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji, delivered a wonderful speech with the theme of "New Educational Scenario: The Innovative Integration of AI Technology and E Ink Screen". Wang Xiangdong mentioned that in the future, AI may become an infrastructure like coal, water, and electricity, integrating into all aspects of life, and every technological innovation will greatly promote the development of the education industry.

Wang Xiangdong, Vice President of Yuanfudao Group and CEO of Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji

It is reported that Yuanfudao established an AI research institute as early as 2014, being a pioneer in the industry. Over the past ten years, it has invested more than 10 billion yuan in research and development expenses. Wang Xiangdong said that all the content service products of Yuanfudao have always adhered to two concepts. AI is the basic drive, and the digital content resources of education are very correct and require long-term accumulation.

Currently, Yuanfudao has a series of products such as Yuanfudao, Xiaoyuan Kou Suan, Xiaoyuan Sou Ti, Hai Tun AI Xue, etc. In May last year, based on AI and educational digital content, it launched the first educational smart hardware based on AI + E Ink Screen - Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji. As of September this year, only 16 months after its launch, the overall sales volume has exceeded 1 million units. Yuanfudao has become the company with the largest shipment of E Ink Screen tablets in Asia.

The following is the verbatim record of Wang Xiangdong's speech:

Wang Xiangdong: Dear guests, friends in the audience on-site, and friends watching online, hello everyone!

I am Wang Xiangdong from Yuanfudao. The arrangement of the organizer is very interesting. Before me was a gas company. In fact, we now have a consensus: One day in the future, AI may become our infrastructure like coal, water, and electricity, and it will integrate into all aspects of our lives.

AI Technology Facilitates Educational Transformation

The rapid development of AI has brought great challenges to all walks of life. Of course, the challenges for the education industry may be relatively more rapid. We can see that due to the impact of ChatGPT, the stock price of an overseas education company has dropped by 99%. So the impact of every technological innovation is very great.

At the same time, every technological innovation will greatly promote the development of the education direction. From the initial papermaking technology, which brought books and made content distribution more convenient, followed by the imperial examination system that lasted for more than a thousand years. Then in the Internet era, all interactions can be carried out through computers, and we have the Internet and digital learning content. Later, in the mobile Internet era, we can use fragmented time for learning. Further, we have transformed many learning contents based on text and images into video forms, opening up a fragmented learning method based on videos.

Now, we have entered a period of profound change brought about by artificial intelligence. Just as mentioned earlier, in the future, AI will become the infrastructure of the entire education field, just like coal, water, and electricity. How to embrace AI in this process and turn it into one's own potential is very important.

In this process, what is Yuanfudao Group doing?

In 2014, we established the first artificial intelligence research institute in the industry, with hundreds of scientists and thousands of professional engineers, and successively set up multiple laboratories such as computer vision, natural language understanding, intelligent voice, and large models. The team has won championships in many international large-scale artificial intelligence competitions. Over the past ten years, we have cumulatively invested more than 10 billion yuan in the field of scientific and technological research and development.

In fact, Yuanfudao has always adhered to two concepts: AI is our basic drive, and the digital content resources of education are things that we have always felt are very correct and need to be accumulated. All our content, services, and products are based on the two directions just mentioned. One is AI as the basic bottom drive, and the top is digital resources.

Currently, based on these two directions, we have created products and services that are deeply loved by children, such as Yuanfudao, Zebra AI Xue, Xiaoyuan Kou Suan, Xiaoyuan Sou Ti, Hai Tun AI Xue, and Feixiang Xingqiu, leading the forefront of the educational transformation brought about by artificial intelligence.

AI + E Ink Screen Builds a "Native Learning Scene"

Also based on the AI and educational digital content just mentioned, in May last year, we landed on the hardware level for the first time and launched the Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji, a product based on AI and E Ink Screen.

Here is a good result to share with you. As of September this year, in 16 months, our overall sales volume has exceeded 1 million units, and we have become the company with the largest shipment of E Ink Screen tablets in the entire Asian region.

In fact, in China, the development of E Ink Screen is relatively long. From the initial entry of Kindle into the Chinese market to the subsequent various reading and office notebooks based on E Ink Screen, in the past more than ten years, E Ink Screen products have also experienced rapid and vigorous development in the entire Chinese market. But we think that E Ink Screen can actually have a broader application space to provide a better user experience for our target users and learning scenarios.

After we joined the E Ink Screen industry, we found that the overall E Ink Screen industry is weaker than we imagined. How weak is it?

Before 2022, the annual shipment of large-size E Ink Screen tablets in the entire Chinese E Ink Screen industry did not exceed 1 million units, and the annual sales volume of several leading companies that produce E Ink Screen tablets was relatively large at more than 100,000 units.

We hope to make an educational hardware product for the future and based on children's interactive experience using E Ink Screen. Our expectation for it is, of course, relatively early. In 2022, we expected an annual sales volume of 200,000 to 300,000 units. But when communicating with upstream and downstream enterprises, no enterprise believed this number. They said, "Others have been doing it for more than ten years and only achieved a scale of more than 100,000 units. You come up and say a scale of 200,000 to 300,000 units. This thing is a bit unreliable."

So we found that the upstream factories in the industrial chain are not supportive. In everyone's impression, or in the cognition at that time, the upstream enterprises that make tablets based on E Ink Screen in China can only achieve a scale of more than 100,000 units at most in a year. No factory can support our such production volume and capacity. This is quite different from our expectations.

Secondly, we found that the original E Ink Screen products, the main design scenarios are reading and office. Products based on these two scenarios have not made any optimizations, considerations, or iterations based on the educational scenario.

Theoretically, the tablet industry should be relatively mature, especially the E Ink Screen, which has developed in China for more than ten years. The fact is that the demands we put forward cannot be met by any upstream enterprise.

We found that all the problems encountered in the industrial chain have to be solved by ourselves bit by bit. We find factories that can break through the capacity limit by ourselves, build our own hardware R & D team, find people who can meet our requirements from the fields with high competition density such as mobile phones and tablets, and carry out special talent training.

Another point is that popularizing the E Ink Screen technology is also a long and arduous task. Although the E Ink Screen has existed in China for many years, it has always been relatively popular among the elite and intellectual groups. Relatively speaking, in the first and second-tier cities, people have a relatively clear cognition. In fact, in the third and fourth-tier cities, when people are told what the E Ink Screen is, many people will say that it is a black and white screen with a black and white screen. But in fact, the E Ink Screen can also be in color, but it forms an image through different technical principles - it does not emit light at all, but uses the diffuse reflection of light to achieve its display, just like the books we usually see.

We have been working hard to popularize the E Ink Screen technology to the public. We believe that the E Ink Screen is just because it has been launched for too long, and people's technological innovation and industrial cognition of it still remain in the era when the reader just emerged more than ten years ago, which will mistakenly think that the E Ink Screen is not an industry with such a cutting-edge development.

Today, the theme of 36Kr is the right thing. We always believe that these things are correct, even if it is difficult, it is worth insisting on. In the past, because no one paid attention to it, and because no one invested a lot of human, material, and resources in this industry, various bottlenecks were faced in the early stage of the industry's development. We insist on building our own team, coordinating factories, and solving technical capabilities to bring the E Ink Screen to the scenarios we expect to achieve.

After more than a year of efforts in the past, we have achieved a small progress in conjunction with the entire Chinese E Ink Screen tablet enterprises. In the first three quarters of this year, the sales volume of Chinese E Ink Screen tablets increased by nearly double compared with last year, and its global market share increased from 8.4% to 15.6%.

We have invested so much in the E Ink Screen, and we all think these things are the right things. Why do we insist on doing it? Because we believe that the combination of E Ink Screen and education will be a very imaginative scene and space, which can build a "Native Learning Scene" and solve the essential needs of learning.

We emphasize native interaction because the way children learn and the interactive experience have not changed from the first to the twelfth grade. It is to write and draw on books and test papers with a pen, and this learning method has been verified to have a very high concentration. This is also the original intention of Yuanfudao to design educational products based on the AI interactive scene - to achieve the most native educational interactive experience.

In the logic of designing products, we found that our scene innovation does not hope to create new needs, but to better restore the original needs. Only in this way can it truly conform to the direction and concept of education.

The visual health, native interaction, and immersive concentration required by the "Native Scene" - these are exactly the advantages of the E Ink Screen: It does not emit light and is more friendly to the eyesight of teenagers; it provides a reading and writing experience like paper and pen; according to the research report of foreign brain science experts, compared with the ordinary LCD tablet, it can significantly improve the user's concentration.

Large Models Will Accelerate Personalized Learning to a Deeper Level

As mentioned earlier, Yuanfudao has always been driven by two wheels. First, we are based on AI technology, and second, we are based on educational digital content. In the Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji, we continue to leverage the advantages of the high-quality learning resources accumulated by Yuanfudao for more than ten years, equipped with more than 1.5 billion + question bank resources, 300 million + detailed explanation videos, 1 million + knowledge point relationship links, and 10,000 + subdivided knowledge points. On the basis of our own high-quality resources, we also cooperate with 5 authoritative educational supplement institutions, including the national-level educational supplement Yi Ke Yi Lian in the Shanghai region, as well as the well-known 53 series, Experiment Class, Huanggang Xiaoyuan Zhuang, and Olympic Mathematics Fan San Yin Yi, etc. We insist on doing the right thing and providing the right content to our users in the right way.

Here, the content is not presented to the users by piling up in the product. Through AI technologies such as the knowledge graph, we structurally process these contents. The knowledge points are not linked in a single line, and the knowledge points at different levels are intricately intertwined, presenting a close relationship - from the three dimensions of point, line, and surface, the contents such as questions, question types, knowledge points, analysis, detailed explanation videos, and knowledge point relationship links are re-disassembled and linked to make children's learning and practice more scientific, systematic, and accurate.

Through AI empowerment, we have built a personalized learning link, from intelligent question generation to intelligent correction, wrong question induction, wrong question explanation, and then to drawing inferences from one instance and special practice for weak points, forming a complete personalized learning and practice closed loop.

In the above six links, we have all reconstructed with large models. In the direction of question generation, more accurate recommendations are made with large models; based on the content of the answers, greater coupling is carried out with semantic understanding, and the right and wrong of the answers themselves can be judged, and subjective and objective questions of all subjects can be corrected. Including the explanation of wrong questions, we have made more implants and connections.

Why do we want to make a learning and practice machine based on AI, rather than a learning machine or other machines?

The traditional learning tablet "emphasizes learning over practice", but practice occupies a very large proportion in the learning process. People often say that three points are for learning and seven points are for practice. So we want to make a learning and practice machine that "balances learning and practice". The learning method that emphasizes learning over practice emphasizes the unified learning and single input of content, and it is more of a passive and receptive learning. The learning method that balances learning and practice emphasizes personalized learning and practice: It pays attention to the input and output of content, and it is an active and exploratory learning.

In May last year, when we launched the Xiaoyuan Xue Lian Ji, we were the only "Learning and Practice Machine" on the market. Now, if you search on the e-commerce website, you will find that there are many products called "Learning and Practice Machine", and the "Learning and Practice" function has become the standard configuration of the learning tablet. We are very glad to see that the "Learning and Practice Machine" category we created has led the traditional learning products to change from "emphasizing learning over practice" to "balancing learning and practice", truly benefiting more student users.

In the personalized learning link process, we have introduced many applications of large models. We believe that in the future, large models will play a deeper role in the personalized learning process and will also provide further assistance to our existing actual products.

In the past year, based on large models, we have launched functions such as AI Reading and AI Q & A. During the learning process, you can ask questions to the learning and practice machine at any time. For example, when you are reading a book, you can ask "Why did Lu Zhishen uproot the willow tree?" These problems do not have a good solution through traditional AI technology, but in the educational chain designed based on the AI large model, the solutions to these problems will become possible.

We believe that every child should have his own exclusive AI learning companion in the future. It not only knows his learning data very well, but also is familiar with his emotions, learning status, and learning concentration during this period. In the era of large models, we can achieve all these things through the capabilities such as large model semantic understanding. Through the continuous analysis of various factors such as the child's existing learning situation, learning behavior, and learning concentration, we will give the child the optimal learning direction and method improvement based on his current state, habits, and preferences.

Still falling on this sentence, we believe that every child will have his own exclusive AI learning companion, and we will also continue to make our own efforts in this direction.

Thank you all!