Chapter 2377 Only machines can defeat humans

Zhou Buqi could also feel that Yang Zhiyuan was in a low mood, and he didn't want to let it go, so he took the initiative to visit his house in the evening and talk about Yahoo.

Yang Zhiyuan had a strong sense of failure.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has divested its business for sale.

In fact, I have been doing these things for the past two years. For example, last year it sold the bookmarking website Delicious and the job search website Hotjobs.

Now even Flickr is being sold off, which is really sad.

You know, these companies were all acquired by Yang Zhiyuan when he was CEO of Yahoo, and they were all cleared one after another... This basically stamped the label of a complete failure during Yang Zhiyuan's time in charge of Yahoo.

There is nothing we can do about it.

The company's decisions are based on reason.

Zhou Buqi planned to discuss matters with him, so KR launched a mobile client. At that time, Ucgram had already begun to rise and become popular around the world. The results of it? Flickr only has a simple photo upload function. After Ucgram became popular, the Flickr client still did not have any filters or post-processing functions, nor did it effectively integrate social functions into the app. "

After laying out the facts, Yang Zhiyuan could not say anything, "Yahoo did make some mistakes in its judgment on the mobile Internet."

"Is it just a mistake?" Zhou Buqi felt that he was deliberately understating that ne surpassed Canon digital SLR and became the most popular camera equipment in the world. Search for Flickr in the Apple store and Android store, and you can find many unofficial services about Flickr. These third-party merchants have gained a large number of downloads by providing filters and post-processing functions similar to Ucgram for Flickr. After several years, Flickr has been completely unresponsive. "

Yang Zhiyuan nodded, "In terms of product design, there are indeed many serious problems."

"Is this just a product level?" Zhou Buqi shook his head and completely disagreed with this view. "There are serious problems with Yahoo's organizational structure and decision-making mechanism."

There is no doubt about this.

Anyone can see it.

As early as 2008, the founders of Flickr, Butterfield and his wife, announced that they were leaving Yahoo. They made no secret of their reasons for leaving, saying that the company's serious bureaucracy led to slow decision-making and missed many opportunities. If they had the choice again, they would never sell Flickr to Yahoo.

Yang Zhiyuan looked very calm and glanced at him, "I sold Yahoo just in the hope that Ziweixing can solve this problem."

Zhou Buqi said: "If you want to cure a disease, you have to find the root cause. A very important reason why Flickr is in today's situation is that the organizational structure is chaotic and employees have lost their enterprising spirit; business decisions are slow and cannot respond to market changes in a timely manner; lack of resource support, We are forced to put on the shackles of profitability. YouTube is developing so well, but YouTube costs Google hundreds of millions of dollars every year. A very important attribute of Internet products is long-term development and delayed gratification."

Yang Zhiyuan sighed, "Ziweixing has not yet been listed, and has not experienced pressure from investors. Yahoo is a listed company, and pressure from shareholders and investors can easily cause many products to fall into profit traps."

Zhou Buqi said: "Not only is it a profit trap, but Yahoo's years of sluggish performance and constant negative news have also severely affected the enthusiasm of Flickr employees, and outstanding employees continue to move to other companies. In this case, Flickr, which was once the coolest It has also become as lifeless as the parent Yahoo.”

“So we’re going to sell Flickr?”

"What can we do?"

"Isn't it possible to improve?"

"Treat the symptoms first. Improvements cannot change the most critical factors." Zhou Buqi shook his head. "If Yahoo wants to revive, it must reverse the past from the root. The first thing to do is to focus . Focus on Yahoo’s main news business, focusing on the three core sectors of news, finance, and sports, to ensure that Yahoo becomes the most popular news and information app in the smartphone app store. Flickr is not included in Yahoo’s strategic plan ."

Yang Zhiyuan frowned slightly, "Aren't you going to stop searching anymore?"

Zhou Buqi said angrily: "Didn't you hand over the search operation rights to Microsoft? What else are you going to do? Let's wait until the contract expires in two or three years!"

Yahoo has high traffic in the North American market, and its search business also has a certain market share.

However, in order to cut costs, Yahoo has long given up its own search business and outsourced the "search box" to Microsoft and turned it into Bing search.

Yang Zhiyuan glanced at him, "Will Yahoo return to search in the future?"

Zhou Buqi said: "Of course, look at how well Weidian Search is doing. Search is one of Ziweixing's core businesses. It's just that when we go to overseas markets, we don't have that much energy and strength to cover all industries. The same is true for Ziweixing International, and the same should be true for Yahoo. Yahoo's top priority is to regain its dominance in the news and information field, and let's not focus on Flickr's picture social field."

Yang Zhiyuan has given up on Flickr.

The high-level meeting has passed, and there is no point in struggling to promote the merger of Flickr and Pinterest.

However, he still cares about the search business.

After all, search is the traditional core business of the Internet. Almost every Internet giant has its own search business, some within the site and some across the entire network.

"Is there any chance that Yahoo will return to the search business in the future?" Yang Zhiyuan felt a little better.

Zhou Buqi said frankly: "It depends on whether the mobile products of Yahoo App, Yahoo News App, Yahoo Finance App, and Yahoo Sports App can gain market recognition and develop smoothly. The top priority is to re-establish Yahoo's good value A strong, trusted brand. Once the brand recovers, the time will come to relaunch Yahoo Search."

Yang Zhiyuan sighed, "The search business is not easy. Google is already the dominant one. Microsoft has been competing with Google for so many years and has invested no less than 10 billion US dollars, but it has only won a dozen points of the market."

Zhou Buqi naturally knows how difficult it is to search overseas. If it were easy, he would have promoted Weidian to go overseas. In fact, this is basically impossible.

Baidu mobilized all its forces to go overseas and completely lost everything.

However, there is not necessarily no chance at all.

Zhou Buqi said: "Even if Yahoo does search, it will definitely not be in the current search form."

"what is that?"

Yang Zhiyuan has always been worried about the search business.

Back then, Google started by providing search services to Yahoo. As long as Yahoo paid a little attention, it could acquire Google at a very low price.

This is similar to Sohu in China. Lao Yang and Lao Zhang are brothers in distress.

Baidu started out by providing search services for Sohu. Sohu was the largest Internet giant in China at the time, but Lao Zhang didn't like it and thought it was just a search. So he went to Tsinghua University to find a few college students and built it. Later, when Lao Zhang realized what he was doing, he hired Wang Xiaochuan and others from Tsinghua University to do the search. Baidu had already flourished and was preparing to be listed on Nasdaq.

Almost exactly the same situation as Yahoo.

Zhou Buqi smiled and said, "There is an artificial intelligence project at the institute called Rokid-go. Do you know that?"

"Yeah, I play Go."

Yang Zhiyuan had only heard of it, but had not observed it. After all, this is confidential technology, and even group directors and core executives cannot have access to it at will.

Zhou Buqi said: "Rokid-go applies neural networks and deep learning, which is AI's self-learning. It is no exaggeration to say that Rokid-go has a machine's Go thinking, rather than learning from human chess players." of the human mind.”

"Autonomous learning? Self-evolution?" Yang Zhiyuan was shocked, "No way? Has artificial intelligence reached this level?"

Zhou Buqi smiled and said: "It's not like what's shown in science fiction movies, it's not that exaggerated. But AI has self-learning and self-evolution. If Rokid-go imitates human chess players, it will be difficult to defeat the world's top humans. Go players, at least, cannot achieve a crushing victory. Only by changing the track and thinking can we completely defeat human understanding of Go."

Yang Zhiyuan savored the meaning of his words and said tentatively: "So you mean... if Yahoo returns to the search business in the future, it will also adopt this idea?"

There is nothing to hide. Scientists have discussed and predicted too much about the possibility of artificial intelligence. Zhou Buqi just provided one of the angles, saying: "The current search algorithms are all based on human thinking. It is human beings It uses thinking to judge the user’s search keywords to provide relevant content. What kind of search results will machine thinking provide for the same keywords? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to it.”

Yang Zhiyuan was very shocked.

He had long heard that Shen Xiangyang had invested huge manpower and material resources in developing a product for playing Go. How much practical value does this product have? Go is a niche market.

He originally thought that Ziweixing International spared no effort to develop this product just to demonstrate Ziweixing's technical strength to the outside world, thereby adding more technical belief to the "Ziweixing" brand.

I didn’t expect it to have such far-reaching significance!

This is completely a technological exploration for all mankind!

If it is done, it is very likely to change mankind's understanding of artificial intelligence, and it is really possible for technological development to develop in the direction of many plots in science fiction movies.

In the search market, Google is an almost unshakable giant, with Microsoft chasing after it. If this were not the case, Yahoo would not give up its own search business and outsource the "search box" to Microsoft.

If you want to compete with them, you must find another way!

You have to play something different!

Obviously, Boss Zhou has clearly seen the current situation and has tentatively come up with his own thoughts and opinions in this regard. Google's search technology has reached the pinnacle of mankind... Only machines can defeat humans, just like Rokid-go.