On October 31, Midea Group’s 30th Science and Technology Month Conference and Awards Ceremony was held grandly in Shunde, Foshan.
Midea Group’s annual Science and Technology Month is an important window for it to comprehensively display its latest achievements in technological innovation, industrial breakthroughs and talent cultivation.
The theme of this Science and Technology Month is “AInnovation”, and “AI” is included in the theme of Science and Technology Month for the first time.
A few days ago, Wang Jianguo, CEO of Midea Group, revealed that in the next three years, Midea Group will invest at least 50 billion yuan in research and development funds to lay out cutting-edge fields such as AI large models and embodied intelligence.
At the Science and Technology Month Technology Forum on October 31 – Midea Group Visionary Conference, Xu Yi, director of Midea Group’s AI Research Institute, mentioned that the changes brought by generative AI to home information intelligence are mainly reflected in the significant jump in the depth and breadth of interaction.
But he also emphasized that there are still some problems in existing smart home systems. For example, compared with mobile phones and computers, the frequency of interaction between users and home appliances is still very low, and smart home appliances have “almost no” understanding of users.
Xu Yi said in an interview that the interaction quality of smart home appliances should be constructed and improved from six directions: connection, perception, reasoning, execution, memory, and optimization.
He pointed out that connection is to connect all home appliances to each other; perception refers to building multi-modal joint scene perception; after understanding the scene, it is the inference of the user’s intention; after executing the decision, timely memory and update of the home appliance are also very critical.
He believes that in the near future, smart home systems can optimize decisions in real time based on user feedback and provide users with proactive services in a more “silky” way.
Family has always been a key area for AI applications.
China’s smart home market is developing rapidly driven by policy, technology and consumption upgrades. It is accelerating its evolution from single-product intelligence to a whole-house smart ecosystem. It is expected that the penetration rate of AI will increase significantly.
Driven by both demand and technology, AI is driving home services towards full-scenario, personalized intelligence.
As for Midea Group’s new approach to smart home systems, Xu Yi said that the main job of Midea AI Research Institute is to build general capabilities to empower and support the development of all the group’s AI businesses.
In terms of home information intelligence, Midea AI Research Institute is mainly responsible for the task of building a “family brain”.
According to reports, Midea Group will soon launch a new generation interactive system based on a new interactive link architecture. By then, the interactive quality of the smart home system built by Midea will be significantly improved.
“AI is not a ‘vase’, it can truly bring value to users.” Xu Yi believes that current technology can already support home appliances to provide proactive services. The interaction between users and home appliances should be comfortable, customized, and can be updated and optimized in real time.
In terms of embodied intelligence, Wei Chang, Vice President and CTO of Midea Group, revealed that Midea is vigorously promoting “roboticization of home appliances.”
Midea Group has continued to increase its investment in the field of AI in recent years. It established a humanoid robot innovation center last year and will continue to increase investment next year.
Midea Group’s humanoid robot business not only produces core components, but also complete humanoid robot products, and is currently developing superhuman robots.
