At the starting point of 2025, if you were asked to choose 50 keywords to summarize the key technologies and application directions of AI, which 50 would you choose?
Over the past year, Tencent Research Institute has continuously tracked the technologies and trends in the field of artificial intelligence, throughAI Daily Express, AI 50 Keywords Weekly, One Week Tech Nine-Grid, AGI Roadmap and Large Model Creation Camp online roundtables, AI&Society high-end seminars and Hundred People Hundred Questionsand other branded columns, tracking frontier developments in technology applications, connecting with the ideas and viewpoints of frontline experts, and deeply thinking about the impact of AI on social development, it has formed more than ten reports represented by the "Industry Large Model Report", "Top Ten Trends of AIGC — Entering the Era of Machine Exobrains", "Industrial Large Model Application Report", "Ten Questions on 'AI Companionship'", "On-Device Large Models", "Inflection Point? Journalism in the AIGC Era", "Financial Large Model Application Report" and "Large Model Security and Ethics Research Report 2024", continuously providing our thoughts and insights for all sectors of society to understand and apply AI.
And in this process, we also unexpectedly discovered that the daily accumulation of research bit by bit is gradually bringing about a qualitative change, verifying that the research process also exhibits the "emergence" phenomenon based on massive information input. For example, "AI Daily Express" has researchers carefully select ten pieces of AI progress information every day. Even though what is summarized is only compressed content, it has unexpectedly precipitated into an AGI database of more than 300,000 Chinese characters. It has not only deepened our understanding of the AI field, but has also become the foundation for researchers to comprehensively understand and gain insight into the development trends of AI technology and industry. We also once attempted, around directions such as on-device intelligence, image processing,video generationandembodied intelligence, to carry out special research, verifying that researchers, with the support of massive information, can achieve trend extraction based on information compression, and received very good industry feedback.
Furthermore, we thought, could we further compress the key information and special research accumulated in our AGI database throughout the year, compress it into 50 keywords, and give more people the opportunity to grasp the basic landscape and future trends of the AI field? We conducted this experiment together with AI and completed this report.
Here we share our experimental process:
- Step1: Based on researchers' tracking and understanding of the AI field, divide large model technology and applications into eight major directions, namely:foundation models, image processing, video generation,3D generation、coding assistants、Agent, on-device intelligence and embodied intelligence。
- Step2: Invite researchers following each direction to carefully select about 30 keywords in each field based on the 2024 progress data for that direction in the AGI database, and then after multi-person discussion confirm 6-8 of the most representative keywords.
- Step3: Drawing on the two thinking characteristics of "fast thinking" and "slow thinking" that both humans and large models possess, we analyzed each selected keyword in two dimensions, and "supervised" and "guided" AI in drawing 50 AI keyword cards.
- In the "fast thinking" part, researchers led the direction, directing AI to generate keyword introductions and visual expressions, and deciding whether to accept the generated results. If they did not meet the standards, they then guided AI to redraw them.
- In the "slow thinking" part, researchers provided the special research results accumulated earlier, and confirmed the output logical format, guiding AI to assist in sorting out the development context and trends, ultimately generating core observations, logical chains and essential insights.
- Step 4: Based on the 50 card prototypes generated through human-machine collaboration, further proofreading and revisions were carried out, and human designers refined the design in our chosen style, ultimately forming the research report "Decoding the AI Landscape: 50 Keywords".
It should be said that this is an unconventional exploration and also an experiment in human-machine collaboration. Its value lies in the fact that, with the assistance of AI, human researchers were able to compress and distill massive amounts of information in the AI field, make trend judgments, and express them visually, so that ordinary people without a technical background in AI can also understand the general outline of the AI field through these 50 cards. At the same time, we also need to point out that the rigor of this report, especially some of the visual diagrams, may still find it difficult to reach the level of results written entirely by human researchers, and we also ask technical experts to criticize and correct it.
Standing at the starting point of 2025, we hope these 50 cards can provide you with useful reference for learning, research, and decision-making. Tencent Research Institute will also continue to deepen exploration in the field of AI & Society, and we sincerely invite friends from all walks of life to pay attention and participate together, joining hands to move toward a future of intelligent symbiosis.
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