Netease Youdao has released a large educational model "Ziyue", how many points can be tested

Source: AI Lanmeihui (ID: lanmeih001)

Author: Yi Qi Editor: Wei Xiao

In March last year, NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng judged at the earnings conference call that 2022 will be the turning point year for smart education hardware.

Just one year later, the track will turn again——

Along the general direction of AI, turn to the big model.

On the afternoon of July 26, 2023, NetEase Youdao held a press conference on the application results of Youdao's "Ziyue" educational large-scale model in Beijing. At the meeting, NetEase Youdao released a large-scale model "Ziyue" for the vertical education industry. CEO Zhou Feng and the R&D team shared the large-scale model's multiple capabilities in translation, calculation, and question-and-answer, as well as its advantages compared with peers.

Netease Youdao urgently needs the help of a large model.

The previously released financial report for the first quarter showed that the company's revenue was 1.163 billion yuan, down 3% year-on-year; net profit fell 114% compared with the same period last year.

With the emergence of generative AI and the heated competition in smart education, Youdao is naturally not far behind: For example, old players have obtained the new weapon of version t0, and NetEase Youdao, which has been blessed with large models, can become the "version answer" of smart education?

Large model general solution: AI+hardware

The focus of the press conference was the large model of Ziyue, but software, hardware, virtual humans... Within three hours, almost all AI hotspots in 2023 were mentioned by Netease Youdao.

First of all, for the display of the large model results, Zhou Feng and Youdao team directly used six application scenarios such as the unreleased new generation learning machine, translation pen and virtual spoken language teacher Echo to demonstrate.

Understanding context, common sense reasoning, language generation... The "generation" ability of this generation of generative artificial intelligence has completely subverted the cognition of the past, and Youdao has further strengthened it based on its own neural network translation data accumulated over the years and collected user needs. The ability of Ziyue big model in the field of education.

In internal research, the translation ability of the Ziyue model has surpassed ChatGPT and all mainstream translation engines on the market.

One of the large-scale model carriers is an AI learning machine that has been extremely popular in recent years. Youdao R&D and product teams have entered the original questions of the high school entrance examination in recent years into the learning machine, and performed on-site demonstrations including composition correction, mathematical analysis, and English reading comprehension. In the real scene, the learning machine gave correct answers or reasonable comments.

During the post-meeting interview, the senior executives of the company said that the large model of Ziyue is now being developed and optimized based on the existing team of 100 people. Translation, as Netease Youdao’s advantageous project for many years, has relatively perfect functions: “In terms of technology surpassing manpower (translation), replacing human After that, we should expect a larger scale of application adoption.”

Echo, the virtual human language coach, pointed to another scene with low volume but high demand: oral training. Based on the accumulation of Youdao’s Chinese-English translation and understanding business, voice system, and mature virtual human modeling, Zhou Feng and Youdao’s R&D team said frankly that they “have high hopes”—looking forward to this spoken language coach, who can gradually replace the real person training .

"It's a membership fee program, but it's much cheaper than real people." Compared with expensive real oral English coaches, the cost of using virtual people is lower for users.

"But (oral sparring) is a market worth tens of billions after all."

The only bottleneck is mathematical ability—the large model’s answer to complex mathematical problems involves the underlying logic and technical architecture of artificial intelligence. AI education practitioners are generally seeking breakthroughs, but there may not be qualitative changes in the short term.

Deep in the Red Sea, ask AI for help

Compared with chatting ability, Youdao big model pays more attention to landing.

Netease Youdao also needs to land and realize it.

After the double reduction, the smart education track has turned into a red sea in less than a year, with many players and similar product positioning: Baidu, HKUST Xunfei, Backgammon, Reading Lang and other masters have combined "wisdom" with AI is highly bound and mentioned repeatedly.

As generative AI large models exploded this year, after Baidu and iFlytek respectively released the large models, they both chose education as one of the first businesses to implement the large models.

In terms of time, Netease Youdao has been the leader in the field of translation for many years in China, but in the learning machine and other hardware markets, Youdao is a relatively late entry into the market, and the learning machine lists of Tmall and JD. The lagging position is quantified as the ranking: the new product list is fifteenth, and the best-selling list has no ranking.

Smart education hardware has long been recognized by institutions as a highly competitive 100-billion-level market. However, the threshold of the learning machine industry is not high, and the products of various companies are generally becoming more and more homogeneous. You are also foreign, and I am also foreign; you are also AI, and I am also AI.

Last year's annual report showed that, as the company's second largest revenue business, NetEase Youdao's hardware business revenue in 2022 will be 1.26 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.2%. Although it is still the fastest growing business of NetEase Youdao, compared with the 82% growth rate in 21 years, the growth rate has dropped significantly. In the first quarter of this year, hardware revenue experienced a negative growth of 16% year-on-year.

There are many players vying for market share, and NetEase Youdao, whose growth has stalled, chose to learn from AI and turn to the big model for help.

As a leading company with a complete supply chain and a mature user ecology in the smart education track, Youdao seems to have found a chance to break the game.