3 Trends Shaping the Next Generation of the Internet: Dowson Tong

Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Tencent’s Smart Industries Group, recently spoke at the Boao Forum for Asia about the future of the Internet and its trends. Tong outlined three major trends that will shape the next generation of the Internet: AI-based, immersive, and integration with industries.

He pointed out that artificial intelligence (AI) will become the main driver of the internet, with machines delivering content and even services, changing the relationship between supply and demand.

Dowson Tong shared insights on the next generation Internet at the Boao Forum for Asia on March 30.

Tong believes that artificial intelligence will significantly improve work efficiency and accelerate the development of cloud computing. He noted that large-scale AI models require high computing power and a high-speed connection. Therefore, the application of artificial intelligence requires the cloud as a carrier to be “plug-and-play”. Therefore, the integration of AI and cloud will have a major impact on the growth potential and development model of the cloud.

Artificial intelligence as the core driver for the next generation of the Internet

“AIGC will improve productivity and transform the Internet supply-demand relationship. In the past, people were the major providers of Internet content and services, but machines may become providers in the future,” Tong said in his speech.

In addition to being AI-driven, Tong also said that the Immersive convergence, introduced by Tencent in 2022, is another trend of the future of the Internet. Internet information has evolved from graphics and text to a three-dimensional representation of the real world, enabling two-way interactions and operations between the virtual and real worlds.

For example, Tencent Cloud and Sany Group jointly launched an unmanned mining truck, allowing truckers to sit in a comfortable office and drive unmanned mining trucks through the screen. This was made possible by the integration of Tencent Cloud’s real-time audio and video technology and 5G network, which effectively copes with weak network conditions and reduces video transmission delays from seconds to less than 100 milliseconds. This ensures smooth, stable and reliable remote control.

The next generation Internet is becoming more and more deeply integrated into industries. Companies across the value chain, from design and manufacturing to marketing, are increasingly using the Internet to improve production and efficiency.

AI-accelerated cloud development

Tong believes that AI technology will greatly improve production efficiency.

One example is the automatic 3D virtual scene generation solution developed by Tencent AI Lab. Presented at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, the solution uses AIGC technology to create realistic and diverse virtual city scenes in a very short period of time. time from scratch. The “city” covers 25 square kilometers where 4,000 buildings are located and 130 kilometers of streets run. Building such a large city used to take several artists a few years, but now it only takes a few weeks with the help of artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, Tong pointed out that the development of AI is beneficial for cloud development.

Cloud infrastructure can provide high computing power, which is essential for AI model training. As a result, AI technology will accelerate the use and popularity of the cloud.

The new generation Internet can greatly improve production efficiency, making it quickly applicable to various industries and enterprises. At the same time, AI technology requires the cloud as a carrier to be “plug-and-play”, which will increase cloud penetration. In the future, more industries will move to the cloud and more people will use it.

Tencent’s Hunyuan AI large model has covered natural language processing, computer vision, multimodality, and many industry and domain models. It also improved the accuracy of ad recommendations in Tencent’s products and services.

The integration of AI and cloud will enable faster and more efficient production. The future of the internet is exciting and we can expect to see transformative changes in the coming years.