Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 372 X1 Test Fighter Charge

After the press conference, it was past 11:50 in the evening. When the outside world was still discussing Zhiyun robots, countless people were already hunkering down on Zhiyun's official website.

Many of them are users who were attracted by the Zhiyun robot and really want to buy it. They are generally not short of money and are middle-aged and young people, and the majority of them are men.

These people are well aware that some of Zhiyun’s important advanced products are often in short supply in the short term after they are released. If they wait until tomorrow to go directly to the offline Zhiyun flagship store to buy them, it is estimated that the opportunity will be gone.

Therefore, the best option is to place an order on the official website in advance and then pick up the goods at the offline flagship store tomorrow.

In addition to these real users, there are actually quite a few media personnel and onlookers also lurking on the official website.

These people came purely to see how long it would take for the Zhiyun robot's online sale to sell out.

Others come for the news.

Even many people from overseas came to watch. Even if the product is not yet on sale in their local country, it is still a good idea to visit the official website first to take a look.

At the same time, in addition to ordinary people and the media, there are also a large number of purchasing personnel from high-tech companies who are also waiting...both domestic and foreign.

They need to purchase the physical Zhiyun robot as soon as possible, and then send it to the laboratory for testing and evaluation. Some even hope to copy and imitate it.

However, the path of plagiarism and imitation is unlikely to work, at least not in the short term of ten years... The technological gap is too large, making it difficult to imitate.

Especially the most core big data model and the core algorithm behind it, these two things cannot be imitated at all.

If they want to imitate, they must first come up with an efficient core algorithm, and then train a motion model and a human-computer interaction model.

And this is very difficult even for Gugou to figure out.

The field of algorithms can be said to be a field that is purely about brainpower, and has nothing to do with experience or technical accumulation...

An algorithm created by a genius algorithm engineer may take an ordinary engineer a hundred years to create.

Relying on Xu Shenxue's scientific research system, Zhiyun Group can mass-produce geniuses, which is unmatched by other companies.

----

Under the attention of many people, after midnight, the full payment ordering channel was officially opened on the Zhiyun robot ordering page in the official mall on Zhiyun’s official website.

In an instant, a large number of people flocked in, and then chose the model, color, flagship store location, pick-up time, pick-up person and other information, and finally made the payment directly and successfully.

Although the entire ordering page requires a lot of information to be filled in, many people still complete the order within a minute.

Three minutes later, some people with slower hand speeds found that they could no longer submit spot orders...

The official website’s online sales quota has been fully ordered. If you want to continue placing orders in the future, you can only place a pre-order with full payment.

Due to time constraints and the fact that this type of robot is complex to manufacture and technically difficult, the initial production capacity is very limited, and Zhiyun Group has only stocked a total of 5,000 units.

These 5,000 units were sold out in just three minutes. If people want to continue buying, they can only queue up their orders, which will be shipped according to the factory's production schedule.

Although many people failed to buy the spot goods, they did not hesitate and quickly queued up for orders.

After the many media personnel who were waiting and watching confirmed that the stock had been sold out, they sent out their already prepared articles five minutes later.

“Five minutes after the Zhiyun robot was launched, 5,000 units were sold out!”

"Zhiyun Robot is very popular on the market. Just half an hour after the purchase channel was opened, the purchase order number on the official website has reached 28,000!"

Zhiyun robots were very popular in the early days after they were launched on the market, which also made Ji Chenghe and other marketing department staff feel relieved.

Whether the subsequent sales will be good or not may depend on the performance, practicality and other hard power of the Zhiyun robot.

However, the extent of the first batch of sales after the press conference will largely depend on the capabilities of the marketing department.

After all, good wine needs no bush... Even if you praise the robot to the skies at the press conference, it is very difficult to stimulate and encourage users to place orders.

After all, the starting price is 300,000 yuan, and the bipedal model is 400,000 yuan... There are also paid options and robot server hosts that cost more than 100,000 or 200,000 yuan.

This is a very expensive product, and it is an expensive product that tends to be a toy.

Even though the Zhiyun brand is high-end enough, it is still quite difficult to get people to spend hundreds of thousands to buy this big toy.

How to stimulate more users to place orders in the early stage and create the first buying frenzy requires colleagues in the marketing department headed by Ji Chenghe to rack their brains.

To this end, Ji Chenghe and his team carried out various marketing work a month ago and launched a large-scale marketing campaign around the world.

After the press conference officially started, Xu Shenxue held a press conference at the press conference site, while Ji Chenghe brought a large group of marketing elites from the marketing department to launch a marketing campaign across the entire network.

Through various carefully prepared marketing strategies, we guide different groups and create a voice that is consistent with what Zhiyun’s marketing department sees, thereby guiding users and stimulating them to place orders.

And now it seems that Ji Chenghe and his team have done a quite successful job.

In just half an hour, we received orders for 28,000 units, of which 5,000 were spot orders and 23,000 were queue orders.

And this is just the beginning. Ji Chenghe and his colleagues will continue to stimulate users to place orders and strive to further increase the order queue to more than 50,000 units.

"Everyone must have worked so hard these past few days. Tonight's work is almost done. We will do another round of promotion tomorrow morning!"

“Starting at nine in the morning, we will conduct a comprehensive promotion on the robot spot delivery and user experience!”

"Don't be afraid to spend money, we have prepared enough funds for this marketing campaign!"

"From short videos, WeChat Moments, Weibo, and other information platforms, put them all there for me. Tomorrow I want to see the entire internet discussing our robot!"

“It’s not just about talking about the robot verbally, but also about seeing a lot of test videos, especially various test videos from the user’s perspective!”

“Among the first 5,000 users tomorrow, there will definitely be a lot of people who will use them right away and then upload videos. We need to find videos with promotional selling points and then increase traffic so that more people can see our robots!”

"Do your best. The robot project is our last big project this year. It's the final battle. We need to win this battle well. Then I can ask Mr. Xu for more year-end bonuses for everyone!"

In the Xu family villa several kilometers away, Xu Shenxue also paid attention to the online sales data of Zhiyun Robot's official website, and then sent congratulatory messages to several leaders of the robot project team.

The sales volume of 28,000 units in half an hour can be said to have met the sales expectations of Zhiyun Group’s senior management for Zhiyun robots.

If Zhiyun increases its marketing efforts in the future, it is possible to sell 50,000 units in China alone in the first month. In addition, there are overseas markets waiting for Zhiyun.

As a world-class multinational company, Zhiyun Group's products have always been aimed at the global market, not just the domestic market.

Its core product, the S series mobile phone, is a typical representative. For a long time, the sales share of Zhiyun S series mobile phones in overseas markets has been very high and is getting higher and higher... In the early years, the overseas market accounted for only about 60%, but now, the overseas market share has increased to more than 70%.

The same is true for other A series and C series mobile phones, as well as PC products, tablets, smart watches, Bluetooth headsets, etc. Overseas sales have long accounted for more than 50%, and some products can reach more than 70%.

It’s not that the growth rate of the domestic market is not strong enough, but that the sales volume of Zhiyun Group’s products is growing too fast.

The sales of mobile phones increased from tens of millions of units to 100 million, 200 million, and finally to 300 million units.

The global sales volume of smartphones is only about 1.5 billion units, and Zhiyun alone accounts for 20% of the sales market share.

At the same time, all of Zhiyun Group’s various smart terminal products are mainly high-end, and only the C series of mobile phones are more affordable.

This means that although the domestic market is huge, it is also unable to absorb Zhiyun Group's huge production capacity of high-end products.

If Zhiyun Group relies solely on the domestic market, the sales of various smart terminal products will plummet by more than 60% in an instant, which will be a disaster.

The export proportion of semiconductor products is even greater. Many semiconductor products seem to be sold to many domestic terminal manufacturers, but in fact these other manufacturers produce various terminal products, such as mobile phones, computers, tablets, smart TVs and other smart terminals, as well as memory sticks, solid-state drives and other products as components.

A considerable portion of these products are also exported.

After all, China is a world factory, producing massive amounts of various smart terminal products and ordinary electronic products every year. Such a huge production capacity is supplied to the global market and cannot be absorbed by the country itself.

If we just talk about the domestic market...taking mobile phones as an example, the domestic mobile phone market has continued to maintain a high growth rate this year, and the average price has continued to increase, but the total volume is only close to 500 million mobile phones...the sales of these 500 million mobile phones also include mobile phones of various price ranges, from medium to high and low.

The combined annual output of Zhiyun Electronics and Weiku Electronics exceeds 500 million units!

The domestic market can’t even support Zhiyun and Weiku Electronics...and there are still a lot of mobile phone manufacturers behind them, such as Huawei, Dami, OV, Lianxiang and other first-tier manufacturers as well as a lot of second-tier and third-tier mobile phone manufacturers.

If the production capacity of foreign brands' production bases in China is included.

Then the entire China's smartphone production capacity exceeds 1.5 billion units...basically accounting for the world's smartphone production capacity.

By the way, there are actually about 500 million to 600 million feature phones produced.

Last year's mobile phone production capacity was approximately 2.1 billion units!

People all over the world, from Africa to Europe, and even in the United States, all use mobile phones that are actually made in China.

At least that's the case for now.

Even though Apple has been banned from selling in China, it has been pushing for the transfer of its supply chain to Vietnam or India in recent years. However, the transfer has not been smooth. After two or three years, the effect is not zero, but it is almost zero. So it is very embarrassing that their production base is still in China...

However, due to the battery fire incident this year, Sixin suffered a setback in the Chinese market, and its market share dropped sharply. At the same time, Sixin is also making plans in Vietnam and trying to transfer the supply chain, but their main production base is still in China!

At present, China's supply chain advantage in the field of smart terminals is almost unshakable!

Especially with Zhiyun Group supporting us from behind!
We have absolute advantages in supply cost, technology and other aspects.

And this advantage will continue to be maintained in the foreseeable future.

China's smart terminals and even the entire consumer electronics industry chain are supplied to the world... Similarly, Zhiyun Group's various smart terminal products and semiconductor products are also supplied to the world.

Therefore, the overseas market is very important to Zhiyun Group.

The newly launched Zhiyun Robot also attaches great importance to the development of overseas markets. All aspects of the advance layout have been prepared, and the next step is to promote Zhiyun Robot step by step to Japan, South Korea, the European Union, North and South America, ASEAN, and the Indian market.

If tens of thousands of units are sold in a regional market, and then when accumulated in many markets, the sales volume can reach 200,000 units or even more per year.

Otherwise, the domestic market alone would not be able to support a project as large as the Zhiyun Robotics project...cost recovery would become very difficult.

Therefore, the overseas market cannot be lost!
The next day, Xu Shenxue took a quick look at the news on the Internet. Just as he expected, news about Zhiyun robots was everywhere on the Internet, and Zhiyun robots were everywhere on various information platforms.

Many of them are test and experience videos of users after purchasing Zhiyun robots.

Many of these videos were noticed by Zhiyun Group’s marketing department, and then promoted, and then appeared in front of more people.

After Xu Shenxue briefly browsed the news about Zhiyun robots on the Internet, he put down his phone, stood up, walked onto the lawn and started playing football with his eldest son.

Lin Yaxian, who was standing by, was holding her little daughter and watching the father and son playing football... with a smile on her face.

She likes her husband's attitude of separating work and life. Although Xu Shenxue has a lot of things to do, he still tries his best to take time out to accompany his children as they grow up.

In this way, when their children grow up, the father in their memory will not be a simple world richest man... but a father who plays with them, and there will be laughter in their childhood!
In her memory, although her father loved her very much, he was always busy when she was young and was often not seen. As a result, when she recalls her childhood now, she lacks her father's presence.

She doesn't want her children to go through her childhood!
Of course, Xu Shenxue doesn't have much time to spend at home with his children.

In the afternoon, Xu Shenxue appeared at the headquarters of Zhiyun Group. He first went to the robot team to express his congratulations, and then visited the people in the marketing department who were still in a very busy state, and brought milk tea to the marketing team.

Then I went to the office to handle many daily affairs.

As it was getting close to evening, when Xu Shenxue was about to go back, he received a special phone call.

After Xu Shenxue answered the phone, he said a few words and then said, "I will be there on time tomorrow."

After hanging up the phone, Xu Shenxue called the head of the security team up and said, "Tomorrow's schedule has changed. We are going to the southwest to check out the X1 project. Please contact the relevant agencies and take confidentiality measures!"

The head of Xu Shenxue's security team is a middle-aged man in his forties, with the surname Ouyang and the given name Donglai. He has a very impressive resume and an extremely high level of confidentiality.

Ouyang Donglai said: "Understood, I will arrange it!"

Ouyang Donglai then left the office and went to the security office next door, where he began to make phone calls one by one: "Tomorrow's schedule has changed. Director Xu is going on a long trip. Prepare business jet No. 3!"

"Don't use the original crew. Ask Crew A to cancel their vacation and come back on standby. The crew members must be in place before 8 a.m. tomorrow. The relevant routes must be reported and applied for in advance!"

"I will send you an encrypted email later. You can read the details yourself. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me!"

After hanging up the phone, he made a few more calls.

After making more than ten calls in succession, Ouyang Donglai took out the personnel list again, and then carefully selected a group of people and ordered them to stand by.

While Ouyang Donglai was busy, Xu Shenxue also read a secret report sent by the secret project team: the X1 project will conduct its first secret flight tomorrow.

Although the X1 project seems a bit mysterious to people like Ouyang Donglai, it is no secret to Xu Shenxue.

This so-called X1 project is actually a cooperative project of "advanced artificial intelligence fighter jet".

The 'Advanced Artificial Intelligence Unmanned Fighter Project' in Zhiyun Group is also called Project X for the sake of confidentiality!

One thing that must be made clear is that Zhiyun Group does not actually manufacture aircraft. What it develops is the artificial intelligence system for controlling aircraft. Therefore, the "Advanced Artificial Intelligence Fighter Project" is not actually an aircraft project, but an operating system project for unmanned fighter jets.

Or to put it more simply, Zhiyun Group is developing a "pilot"... Of course, the actual situation is more complicated.
In addition to the artificial intelligence pilot, it is also necessary to integrate various types of sensors, communications and many other software projects.

When all the above projects are integrated together, it is the 'Advanced Artificial Intelligence Fighter Project', or 'Project X'.

The partner manufacturers are responsible for the research and development of the aircraft platform, including the aircraft itself, various sensors, weapons, etc. They are responsible for the hardware part.

At the same time, the partners of Project X were still confused about how to choose the fuselage part. After all, no one had ever made such a sci-fi aircraft before. Many people were unsure and feared that they would take a detour and make mistakes, which would lead to serious negative consequences.

Therefore, in order to be on the safe side, they pulled out three teams at once, came up with three different aircraft design plans, and prepared for an internal bidding, namely X1/X2/X3.

As for the software part that Zhiyun Group is responsible for, this will not change and cannot be changed... For such a large artificial intelligence project, the investment in the entire X project is more expensive than the development of the aircraft...

Each partner collects countless flight data every day and transmits it to Project X. Then, a server array consisting of a large number of AI series graphics cards runs training day and night.

The latest AI4500 graphics card, designed and manufactured based on the -nanometer process, has not yet been used in other projects of Zhiyun Group, but it has been transported by a special plane to the AI ​​server array in the southwest of China...

The AI4500 graphics card is currently the most powerful GPU on the planet and also the most powerful AI training card. It has more than six thousand computing cores and a maximum of 80GB of high-speed video memory. The memory bandwidth reaches 1T and the communication bandwidth reaches an astonishing 1T.

Combined with a variety of internally developed software specifically for AI training, especially the new generation of new architecture, the communication speed between the CPU and GPU has been greatly increased, greatly improving the speed of big data model training.

To see how powerful its performance is, you only need to look at its internal supply price. The internal supply price of this graphics card has reached 120,000!
And in a server array, there are often tens of thousands of these graphics cards... and to train Project X, you need a bunch of servers, not just one!
Project X will be the most advanced and complex data model among the many artificial intelligences developed by Zhiyun Group...or artificial intelligence.

Not counting other hardware investments, the electricity costs of the large number of AI training servers in Project X alone are astronomical!
Therefore, its huge investment is doomed. It is impossible to have a second backup for this thing... It is too damn expensive and we cannot afford a backup.

In addition, there is no other technical team in the world that can carry out this project.

Because currently in the world, only the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of Zhiyun Group has this technology, which can create usable artificial intelligence with the current hardware level.

If we change the technical team, they will not be able to carry out project X using the same hardware.

For this technical core, although hardware is necessary, the software part is actually more important.

So from the perspective of investment and technical team, Project X is the only one in the family... the kind with no backup.

In the bidding for the three sub-projects of the partners, a very important competitive project is how to better adapt and give full play to the performance of Zhiyun Group's X project.

This cooperation model is actually a bit similar to Zhiyun Group developing "pilots" and cooperative manufacturers developing "aircraft"...and it is worth noting that in this model, it is not the pilots who adapt to the aircraft, but the aircraft that adapts to the pilots!
Because... Zhiyun Group not only created this 'pilot' without a backup, but it was also a bit beyond the scope!

It is far more advanced in technical indicators than the artificial intelligence installed in the Zhiyun robot that has been announced and released now... It can even be said that this thing should not have appeared in this era.

It was Xu Shenxue who forcibly used the scientific research system and came up with it!

This is an artificial intelligence that far exceeds contemporary technology!

When simulating flight, Project X can keep the aircraft within half a meter of the ground each time during a super-high-speed dive and take-off. It can also fly at supersonic speeds at ultra-low altitudes in complex terrains. As long as the aircraft's strength can keep up, in theory, this operating system can allow the aircraft to fly at supersonic speeds in valleys, and perform various tricks to keep the aircraft at the limit of its flight performance.

And the performance in terms of mobility is just the basic!
In fact, what is more important is the real-time processing of the sensor data carried by the aircraft and the many data transmitted from other units, and then planning the best flight route, time window judgment and other decisions, and then controlling the aircraft to jump repeatedly on the edge of the limit, looking for the opponent's loopholes and mistakes.

The most important thing is that it will always do the best it can with the information it has... In other words, it will never make mistakes!
These are things that human pilots cannot match!
How to give full play to such top-level artificial intelligence, or the "unmanned fighter big data model", the performance of a super pilot has become an important consideration in aircraft design.

Xu Shenxue has always attached great importance to this project, and now, the project has produced initial results.

It has been integrated into the X1 project and will be making its first flight tomorrow!
This will be the first fighter jet in human history that is controlled by pure artificial intelligence!

The next morning, Xu Shenxue drove to the airport, and then business jet No. 3 took off smoothly. The plane was still on the civil aviation route during the first half of the flight, but then disappeared in the civil aviation route.

More than two hours later, Business Jet No. 3 landed at an inconspicuous special airport.

After getting off the plane, Xu Shenxue was taken to a large hangar next to the airport by the project team members here.

In this hangar, Xu Shenxue saw an airplane with a very strange appearance!

It is not big in size. Xu Shenxue took a look and estimated that it is about 17 or 18 meters long and 14 or 15 meters wide. The overall fuselage is very flat and has no vertical tail. This means that the flight control of this aircraft will be very difficult and requires a very excellent flight control system to control it.

From its appearance, one can tell at first glance that this is an omnidirectional stealth aircraft, and its stealth level is much higher than that of the existing fifth-generation manned fighter jets.

In addition, unlike many stealth drones that place the air intake on the back, the two air intakes of this aircraft are on both sides of the bottom of the fuselage.

This feature means that when it flies at a high angle, the air intake can ensure continuous air intake, which is something that stealth drones with air intakes placed on the back of the fuselage cannot do... This means that it is not only a stealth attack aircraft, but also a stealth fighter.

Judging from the appearance, it is consistent with some people's imagination of the sixth-generation aircraft: no vertical tail and diamond-shaped fuselage.

And more importantly, this plane does not have a raised cockpit... because it does not need a pilot!

After Xu Shenxue took a quick look at the appearance of the aircraft, he was invited by several other partners who were also looking at this project to go and chat and drink tea.

After chatting for a while, Xu Shenxue and a few of them listened to some simple reports from the project team. However, the reports from the partner project team contained a lot of professional terms about aircraft, such as flight speed, range, internal bomb bay, stealth performance and so on.

To be honest, Xu Shenxue didn't know much about these things, and what the other party said in such a professional occasion was too complicated, so he could only listen to the general idea, and then pretend to understand and nod frequently... After listening to the end, he knew a little bit, anyway, this thing is much more awesome than the various manned fighter jets nowadays.

When the people from his own X project team came to explain the control system of the X project, Xu Shenxue became more interested. After all, it was their own thing. But after listening to just a few words, he started drinking tea... Damn, he didn't understand even more.

When the manufacturer's team was explaining, even Xu Shenxue could understand some of the professional terms. But when it was the turn of the person in charge of Project X to explain, he could understand each word separately, but when they were put together, no one knew what they were talking about. It all sounded amazing!
But how powerful is it... ahem, Xu Shenxue said he would think about it again!
Several senior executives from the cooperating manufacturers also looked confused... They actually did a lot of homework before coming, but what they saw on the scene still sounded like a fog.

Xu Shenxue drank his tea awkwardly, then looked at the people opposite him and said, "Artificial intelligence is quite complicated!"

Then I felt speechless.

The X1 project is about to take off, and it is clearly laid out before them. But to be honest, no one, including himself, knows what the X1 project is...

Everyone knows that the X1 project is very advanced and awesome, but no one is quite clear about how advanced it is... This includes the X1 project team of the partner manufacturer that manufactured the aircraft. Many of the R&D personnel are also confused, but they are reluctant to ask because of the mission requirements and confidentiality requirements.

Because they designed the aircraft based on the many parameters passed down by Project X... But the so-called requirements, many design requirements, are not so much requirements as no requirements...

The X project team only requires power supply, sensor data, communication data, precise control of the aircraft, and, yes, space for the intelligent control center, but their opinion on other aspects is: do whatever you like...

As long as the plane can fly in theory, our X system can make it fly for you!
Since the Zhiyun Group X project team said so, the designers of the partner manufacturer's X1 project let themselves go... and then created an aircraft that was pushing the limits in every aspect.

But...can this plane that is pushed to the limit really fly?
This is an aircraft that is 100% impossible for human pilots to control. Various technical indicators of the aircraft are completely beyond the capabilities of human pilots. They are not just a little bit beyond the limit, but several times or even dozens of times beyond. From the very beginning, this aircraft was not designed for human pilots!

However, can Zhiyun Group's X project artificial intelligence really make it fly?

(End of this chapter)