Soviet polar explorer at the NP-8 ice station. Photo: Sputnik On May 28, 1962, two Americans parachuted from the B-17 “Flying Fortress,” landing at Severny Polyus-8 (also known as North Pole-8, or NP-8), a research station destroyed abandoned Soviet Union is drifting on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean. This was the starting point of one of the CIA’s most unusual operations, which went down in history with the codename Operation Coldfeet. Hunting for Soviet ice stations An iceberg station was only useful to Soviet polar explorers until the moment the iceberg on which it rested began to disintegrate. At that time, the scientists will be urgently evacuated and the abandoned station will continue to drift across the ocean until it is completely destroyed. In the early 1960s, the CIA and the US Department of Navy’s Office of Naval Research conducted a real manhunt for abandoned Soviet ice stations. It is believed that in those places are installed sonar detectors of US submarines. Initially, the CIA’s target was station NP-9, discovered by a reconnaissance plane in May 1961. However, this mission stalled and the ice station was pushed too far into the ocean. A tow truck rescues a car mired in snow at a Soviet observation post on an iceberg in the Arctic. Photo: Getty Images In the spring of 1962, about 970 km from Candian Air Force Base in Resolute Bay, another abandoned iceberg station, NP-8, was unexpectedly discovered. It is an opportunity not to be missed. However, American icebreakers could not make their way through the dense ice in the area, helicopters could not reach the location, and it was too dangerous for an aircraft to land on a disintegrating “buoy”. So the CIA decided to drop the agents by parachute. But the question then is how to bring them back. Ultimately, officials decided to use a system that specialized in evacuating CIA agents from hostile territory known as the ‘Skyhook’ developed by Robert E. Fulton in the late 1950s. The system required a a bread-shaped, helium-filled balloon, a 150-meter extension cord and a low-altitude aircraft. Lockheed P-2 Neptune reconnaissance aircraft. Photo: RBTH When they needed to get out of the location, CIA agents would use helium cylinders to inflate their personal balloons, tie one end of the rope to it, and wrap the other end around them. The balloon will rise into the air, and the rescue plane will use special forks to reach for the rope, then release the balloon. The rope was then wound onto a winch and lifted the agents onto the plane. The rescue Major James Smith, an experienced paratrooper who is fluent in Russian, and his colleague, Lieutenant Leonard A. LeSchack, an expert in submarine surveillance systems, spent three days researching the NP-station- 8. They parachute down to the station with some necessary equipment boxes. As expected by the Americans, the Soviet scientists rushed to leave the NP-8 station without taking all the equipment with them. CIA agents unearthed more than 80 documents, collected fragments of equipment left behind by the Soviets, and took about a hundred pictures. Soviet Arctic Station 9. Photo: Sputnik By the time it was designated to evacuate, the weather at station NP-8 had deteriorated dramatically: Visibility had plummeted and icy winds were rushing in. Connie W. Seigrist, the pilot of the plane that rescued the agents, recalls: “I was immediately thrown into a situation that could have been imagined as if I was flying through space.” The aircraft collected the “trophies” using the ‘Skyhook’ system without much difficulty, but with humans it was even more difficult. The wind dragged LeSchack nearly 100 meters above the ice as he waited for evacuation by trying to anchor himself to a block of ice. Even after the plane had picked up, LeSchack spent another 10 minutes dangling in the icy air before being hoisted onto the plane. Major Smith (water drinker) on a B-17 on June 2, 1962; Lieutenant LeShack in the lower right corner. Photo: RBTH After observing what happened to his colleague, Smith released his balloon and grabbed hold of an abandoned Soviet tractor. In the end, he was lifted without any particular difficulty. As a result of Operation Coldfeet, the Americans discovered that the Soviet Union had made significant advances in the study of polar meteorology and polar oceanography. In addition, they obtained evidence that the Russians were using sonar equipment to detect American submarines in the Arctic. “Overall, the Soviet Union’s remarkable achievements in iceberg stations reflect their long experience in this field and the great importance their government places on it,” said Operation Commander, Captain John Cadwalader noted.

——AMTuring

In the autumn of 1950, Alan Turing, who was hailed as the “Father of Artificial Intelligence” by later generations, in the opening chapter of his book “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, tossed out this seems to be “ Whimsical “The problem. Also in this article, Turing proposed a concept that appeared even earlier than “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”—— Turing test . This opened the prelude to human beings’ arduous exploration in the field of AI.

Time flies, and the stars change. Over the past 70 years, AI, which has experienced three waves of development, is quietly entering the daily lives of our ordinary people with various faces. Facial recognition, assisted driving, intelligent medical imaging and other applications are gradually becoming part of the “usual” part of human society, thanks to the continuous maturity of AI technology . And behind this is the continuous investment in AI research and development by academia, industry and even various countries. At present, the research and development of AI in countries around the world has gradually become a “race” trend. But to truly pass the “Turing Test”, no country has yet to be able to do so.

On June 1, at the 2021 Beijing Zhiyuan Conference, the ultra-large-scale intelligent model “Enlightenment 2.0” was officially released. With its 1.75 trillion parameters, it set the world’s largest pre-trained language model record and successfully demonstrated China’s AI technical strength to the world. It is reported that “Enlightenment 2.0” consists of four pre-training models of Wenyuan, Wenlan, Wenhui, and Wenshuo.

Among this, “Wenlan” is good at semantic understanding, visual-language retrieval, etc. Aroused great interest from Meike.com. It is reported that, Wenlan’s strong understanding of semantic information has reached the world’s “leading” level, which can be regarded as a breakthrough in the world’s AI field.Its capabilities are highly scalable and can be applied in a variety of scenarios . Through the research of Wenlan, human beings and the seemingly out of reach of the “Turing Test” are one step closer. The Wenlan R&D team is led by Professor Wen Jirong, Executive Dean of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China, and works closely with Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.

Picture | Professor Lu Zhiwu

Through hard work, we are honored to interview the head of the model group of the Wenlan R&D team—— Professor Lu Zhiwu from Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China , And chatted with him about the future of AI and the story behind Wenlan.

AI development is gradually entering a bottleneck, and the multi-modal pre-training model led by Wenlan may become the key to “breaking the game”

As we all know, the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is Let machines have the same understanding and thinking ability as humans . But more than 70 years have passed, and there is still a long way to go before this goal.

As far as the academic community is concerned, although many AI technologies can have a positive impact on human life, from the perspective of the general trend, AI research and development seems to be reaching a “ bottleneck “. Both the academic circle and the industry need to discover a new “hot spot” in technology to stimulate the entire AI industry to continue to develop by leaps and bounds.

In this case, “Wen Lan” was born.

Professor Lu Zhiwu told reporters, “ In the end, any AI model is actually a neural network. In the past, the industry often used pure text or pure image mode for unimodal training of AI.But now it seems that its effect is not particularly effective . ”

With academic development, The Wenlan team began to focus on pre-training using graphic data pairs at the same time, hoping to tap the new potential of AI . But before this, there has been no successful case in this direction.

In order to obtain better results, the training data used by Wenlan 1.0 and 2.0 Upgraded from 30 million to 650 million unlabeled graphic data. The huge amount of data is very difficult for model training, but it also lays the foundation for Wenlan to have strong visual-language retrieval capabilities and certain common sense understanding capabilities.

In terms of training methods, the Wenlan R&D team adopted an efficient distributed multi-modal pre-training framework and proposed a multi-modal pre-training algorithm based on DeepSpeed ​​to maximize the use of GPU and CPU and optimally support cross-modality Contrast learning.

At present, Google and OpenAI, the top foreign AI R&D institutions, are also trying the research direction of the Wenlan team. The project names are Google ALIGN and OpenAI CLIP respectively. Lan is obviously better, so to speak, At present, Wenlan has reached the top level in the world in terms of mutual inspection of pictures and texts and semantic understanding.

So, where can Wenlan be applied? Professor Lu Zhiwu told reporters that the current Wenlan, like a “brain”, is highly adaptable and can be used in multiple scenarios. Taking one of its strong “retrieval and recommendation” capabilities as an example, Wenlan can be “handy” in the common business scenarios of multiple sub-industries in e-commerce, games, and video.

Professor Lu Zhiwu said “ If the AI ​​we have learned in the past is only a child, now Wenlan is more and more likely to be close to an adult “.

Explore AI “subconsciousness”, “Turing Test” can see more dawn

Wenlan’s ability is beyond doubt. But for the Wenlan development team, After training on massive graphic data, does Wenlan really learn semantic information, and how strong is Wenlan’s understanding ability? , Has become a very attractive question.

For this reason, Wenlan’s R&D team decided to test Wenlan by means of “neuron visualization”. You can simply understand this as a “ Propositional painting “The test. We told Wenlan a meaningful sentence, let Wenlan feedback her understanding of this sentence in the form of a picture.

But please note that the picture feedback here is by no means matching the optimal solution from Wenlan’s existing picture data, nor is it an imitation of specific training data like some AI painting models.

At this time, Wenlan is more like an “ordinary person”. With the help of his own knowledge, he tries to understand the new information passed in from the outside world, and uses the form of pictures to “concrete” his own understanding. What the reaction is The objective existence in Wenlan’s “mind”.

Teacher Lu Zhiwu said “ (In this way) We visualize Wenlan’s “subconscious”, which is the most primitive imagination and understanding of a sentence in her mind . ”

How did Wenlan paint it? Simply put, we all know that on a computer, a picture is composed of pixels. By changing the color of each pixel, you can paint on the computer. And Wenlan, who got the text information, used this method to “original painting”, to express her understanding of the meaning of the sentences we gave with pictures. At this time, Wenlan can be compared to a balance. The two ends of the balance are images and texts. What Wenlan has to do is to make the meanings of the two “remain equal.” . It is worth noting that when visualizing neurons, all Wenlan model parameters are fixed and unchanged, only to modify the input initial noise image.

The Wenlan R&D team said: “ In this way, we can get a glimpse of Wenlan’s “inner world”. That is to let go of all evaluation and application restrictions on Wenlan, so that she can show the most primitive and true, unique understanding of the input text in her “subconscious”. ”

At present, according to Wenlan’s “paintings”, his ability to understand semantics has ranked among the top in the world. In addition to everyday language, Wenlan can also understand ancient poems and can even convey a certain “artistic conception”.

The following are some examples of Wenlan’s actual test (provided by Wenlan R&D team):

Statement to Wenlan: Make a wish on the birthday cake

(Interpretation: The image of the cake is very clear, there is also a candle, and there are dots and dots on the cake. The whole is a cheerful atmosphere for a birthday party.)

A sentence to Wenlan: The day is full of mountains, the Yellow River flows into the sea

(Interpretation: The mountain peaks in the distance obscured the setting sun but did not obscure the afterglow, and the nearby mountains ran towards us like a yellow river.)

Statement to Wenlan: The moon is falling and the sky is full of frost, Jiang Feng Yuhuo is sorrowful

(Interpretation: the red fire on the river, the awning boat nearby.)

Statement to Wenlan: You can pick lotus in the south of the Yangtze River, and He Tiantian with lotus leaves

(Interpretation: the budding lotus on the upper left, the lotus in the middle on the right, the lotus leaves and the whole green.)

Statement to Wenlan: The bright moon is born on the sea, and the end of the world is at this time

(Interpretation: The wavy sea below, and the rising moon on the sea. Although the original meaning of the verse is a full moon, it does not literally express the meaning of a full moon. The large abstraction of the background may be Wenlan’s interpretation of “the end of the world is at this time” Understanding.)

Foresight and persistence make Wenlan “come out of the sky”, diversification and intersection will become the new starting point of the AI ​​wave

For scientific research, correct judgment and persistence are sometimes more important than diligence and hard work. When talking about Wenlan’s research and development process, Professor Lu was deeply moved by it.

Since September last year, the Wenlan team has been working on multi-modal pre-training. Thinking of the process at that time, Professor Lu described: “ It was completely groping in the dark, and the multi-modal pre-training model was very difficult to do, but I still walked down this road decisively (weak correlation between graphics and text + two-tower model). ”

But exploration and persistence are risky. During this period, Professor Lu and his PhD students devoted themselves to this project, and therefore did not publish a paper for a long time. If the direction is wrong, or the model is not trained well, it will be a “grainless” result. The pressure on the entire team can be imagined.

At almost the same time, the front runners in the foreign AI industry: Google and OpenAI, are also doing similar things. And in January of this year, OpenAI released two models similar in direction to Wenlan: DALL-E and CLIP. While shocking the industry, it also proved that the selection of Professor Lu’s team was correct and forward-looking.

However, from the perspective of academic research in domestic universities, universities such as Qingbei seem to have more advantages in AI. Why is the National People’s Congress making a breakthrough in the AI ​​field this time?

Professor Lu Zhiwu believes that the advantage of the National People’s Congress lies in its liberal academic atmosphere and rich cultural ideas.

“ Dean Wen Jirong of Hillhouse College of Artificial Intelligence is very supportive of these valuable explorations.So our overall academic atmosphere is still very relaxed and open . ”

In addition, as a higher education institution specializing in humanities and social sciences, the National People’s Congress has its own unique way of understanding AI. In a sense, in view of the prevailing instrumental rationality, the National People’s Congress tends to be more value rational. This is also one of the reasons why Wenlan’s team was able to take the risk of “no revenue for particles” and insist on completing the research.

In the view of Meike.com, In addition to the unique advantages of the National People’s Congress, Wenlan’s success is inseparable from the forward-looking AI development possessed by Professor Lu Zhiwu, and the excellent capabilities of the entire Wenlan R&D team. .

On the long journey of AI exploration, “breaking” and “standing” are eternal topics. Although Wenlan has made breakthrough achievements, Professor Lu Zhiwu still modestly said that, on the whole, the future development of AI still requires the joint progress of related interdisciplinary subjects such as brain science and neuroscience. However, if the road is hindered and long, the line will come. we believe, Driven by the successful case of Wenlan, more “Wenlan” can emerge in China in the future, so that it can take off the “Turing Test”, the crown of AI, in one step faster. .

“The production of smart phones or smart TVs has ceased to make a breakthrough and make a difference for users. Meanwhile, the development of smart cars, smart homes, smart cities bring to many outstanding benefits and experiences. Therefore, we are determined to put all resources into this spearhead “, Mr. Nguyen Viet Quang, Vice Chairman and General Director of Vingroup, said. Nearly 3 years in the smartphone market, reaping many successes, Vingroup decided to stop this segment to focus more on VinFast. However, VinSmart factories will continue to produce existing phones and TVs until the end of the product’s life cycle to supply the market. Part of the factory will then be used to outsource to partners, with the rest expanded to make new products. VinSmart will also maintain the warranty and customer care as committed with the products sold to the market. Vsmart phones sold to the market are still upgraded and updated with software. According to a representative of Vingroup, after stopping production of smartphones and TVs, VinSmart will focus on developing information – entertainment – service (Infotainment) features; research, design and manufacture of electronic components, battery cell systems, complete electric batteries, electric motors for VinFast cars. VinSmart will also retain research on smart cities, smart homes and IoT devices. VinSmart’s smart home solution appeared at a major urban exhibition late last year and has been operated in two major urban areas, Vinhomes Smart City and Vinhomes Ocean Park. VinSmart was born in June 2018, starting with the production of smartphones with the Vsmart brand. Nearly 3 years of development, Vsmart introduced to the market 19 phone models and 5 TV models.

Deputy Head of Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, Mr. Vo Van Phuong at the opening ceremony tonight. Photo: Tan Chau Mr. Vo Van Phuong (Deputy Central Propaganda Department) and leaders of Tay Ninh province and neighboring localities attended the opening ceremony. Maraton BaDen Mountain 2021 will take place April 24-25, organized by the Department of Culture and Tourism of Tay Ninh province, and sponsored and co-organized by Sun World BaDen Mountain (belonging to Sun Group). Tay Ninh province leaders attended the opening ceremony on the evening of April 24. Photo: Tan Chau This is the province’s first amateur run for Vietnamese citizens, on the occasion of the 46th anniversary of the complete liberation of the South (April 30, 1975–30 / April 2021). Participating in this run, the athletes will explore the beautiful and rich Tay Ninh land on the impressive roads of the run with 4 distances: 42km, 21km, 10km, 5km. The starting point is Sun World BaDen Mountain KDL Square in the National Tourist Area of ​​Nui Ba Den, dubbed the “roof of the South”. Intersection in BaDen Mountain Maraton 2021 Specially designed running tracks around and along the mountainside, taking athletes on a journey to experience the magnificent, greenish natural sceneries, crossing peaceful roads to the center of the province. back to the foot of the legendary Nui Ba. All roads are equipped with water, electrolyte, fruit and medical stations according to standards to “relay” for athletes. Road in the 2021 Mountain Marathon According to the organizers, the BaDen Mountain Marathon 2021 race also spread the spirit of responsible tourism – green tourism and environmental protection. With the theme “Green Run” is not only a message, but also a call for the community to join hands in protecting and protecting nature and the environment through three specific actions: “No litter; Planting. Green trees, Responsible Tourism “to contribute to preserving and beautifying the destination, building and promoting a green-clean – beautiful Tay Ninh tourism image in the eyes of domestic and international tourists. In addition to 3,000 people registered to attend, the Organizing Committee said that the BaDen Mountain Marathon 2021 race had the appearance of special names such as Mr. Doan Ngoc Hai (former Vice Chairman of District 1 People’s Committee, Ho Chi Minh City) – guests honor, Thanh Vu – female athlete who has conquered 4 deserts, Do Trong Nhon – champion of Vietnam Jungle Marathon 2019 … Ba Den mountain peak – Tay Ninh. Mr. Nguyen Thanh Ngoc (Deputy Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee, Chairman of the People’s Committee of Tay Ninh province) said that the organization of the 2021 BaDen Mountain Marathon is in line with the province’s tourism development criteria, towards “green, civilized. , modern”. Mr. Ngoc hopes that this run will become one of the traditional tournaments of the province in the near future.

Galaxy Upcycling at Home’s initiative Samsung was announced at the World Consumer Electronics Show 2021 (CES 2021) earlier this year and is now being tested in beta in several markets such as the US, UK and South Korea. This feature can alert you to the sounds of crying babies or turn on the lights when the light levels drop In this beta, Samsung will allow users to turn old phones into smart home devices that work through Samsung’s SmartThings app, which has two new modes: sound sensor and light sensor. Owners of certain smartphones can download the update to turn the device into a smart home sensor with some functions such as being able to detect the sound of a crying baby or turn on the light when it’s dark. The program is limited to certain smartphones released in 2018 or later. While it’s only recently applied to a few smartphones, it’s a good, accessible service that can help users make use of their old devices. Samsung says the sound sensor mode will help to accurately distinguish sounds in everyday surroundings, and users can choose to save certain recordings. For example, if the device detects sounds such as a baby crying, dog barking, cat sounding, or knocking on the door, it will send an alert directly to the user’s smartphone and the user can hear the sound. Be recorded. Whereas the light sensing mode simply turns your phone into a light sensor, allowing it to detect the level of sunlight or room light to automatically turn on the lights. Samsung says this update includes battery optimization needed to keep the phone powered up and acting as a sensor for long periods of time, though the company didn’t indicate uptime. between charges. Samsung says the “Galaxy Upcycling at Home” feature is available on all S, Note and Z series released in 2018 (S9, Note9 and above) running Android 9 or higher and will be available in the future. More smartphones are supported. Samsung’s upgrade program marks a very humble starting point, and the company can do more if it wants to limit e-waste and make old devices useful. So far, the program has only used microphones and light sensors on older devices. Hopefully in the future, Samsung will take advantage of the cameras of old smartphones to turn old smartphones into IP cameras. Phan Van Hoa (According to Arstechnica, Theverge)

President Moon told The New York Times: “I hope Mr. Biden will become the historic president to take a substantial and irreversible step forward for complete denuclearization and reconciliation. vase on the Korean peninsula “. Mr. Donald Trump and Mr. Kim Jong-un met in Singapore in June 2018. Photo: The Straits Times Referring to the former US president, Mr. Moon said: “Mr. Trump has handled the roundabout and cannot be successful in this regard. The most important starting point for both governments is to have goodwill to dialogue and face to face with each other soon “. Moon also urged the United States to cooperate with China on North Korea and other issues, and warned that if tensions between the two world economic powers intensify, North Korea can take advantage of the situation. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the border between the two countries in 2018. Photo: Reuters The US-North Korean talks and the unprecedented diplomatic interaction between Trump and Kim quickly deteriorated after the two countries failed to reach a substantive agreement on denuclearization and sanctions lifted. After Mr. Biden took office, North Korea quickly rejected efforts to restart negotiations and warned the US should refrain if “wants to rest for the next four years”. North Korea also conducted its first major weapons test since Mr. Biden took office in March by firing two ballistic missiles into the sea.

The aircraft carrying the Cessna Grand Caravan 208B trademark made its first self-driving flight. However, self-driving flights can only serve distances under 500 miles and are of considerable commercial importance. Xwing believes that they can gain a foothold in the context of increasing freight demand. “Over the past year, our team has made significant progress in expanding and refining its AutoFlight,” said Marc Piette, CEO and founder of Xwing. for seamless integration of operations from runway to takeoff, landing and flight operations, all overseen from our operations center via data link routes. In addition, our tested commercial freight operations have provided essential supplies including Covid-19 vaccine to remote communities as of December 2020 ”. The recently conducted flight is a Cessna Grand Caravan 208B-branded aircraft that has left the runway, took off, landed and returned to the fully automatic starting point. The flight is monitored remotely and all air traffic control interactions are performed from the ground. After the recent crashes related to the self-driving system failure on Boeing 737MAX aircraft, many people believe that passenger confidence has been significantly eroded. However, a recent ANSYS study found that was not the case. In fact, 70% of passengers say they’re ready to fly on self-driving flights. Xwing’s entry into the self-driving airline market is seen as the right moment. Recent reports show that by 2025, there will be a global shortage of about 34,000 pilots. The logistics services (logistics) are also under tension with the increasing demand for fast delivery. With the increase in e-commerce sales amounting to $ 4.2 trillion, the success of e-commerce inherently depends on the efficiency of the air transport industry. Xwing plans to leverage its technology for e-commerce logistics, allowing more access to small airports and more efficient freight transportation. Phan Van Hoa (according to ZDnet)