This is a race where any company that succeeds will become a 100 billion US dollar company.

Author: Aiyu from Pencil News

ByteDance has taken another big step. Today, there were rumors that ByteDance was going to make phones, but it was officially denied: what they are actually going to do is a large model solution for mobile phones.

To be precise, ByteDance has had a mobile phone business for a long time.

In 2019, ByteDance acquired Smartisan Technology, initially with the aim of "exploring educational hardware," such as Dali smart homework lamps. In the two years after the acquisition, ByteDance has launched hardware such as the Nut Pro phone and TNT displays.

Even today, the mobile phone project has not been completely abandoned, and ByteDance has responded that there are still some models being planned to meet the needs of Smartisan's old users.

Of course, the core of ByteDance's latest big move is not hardware, but rather a large model software solution for mobile phone hardware manufacturers.

It has to be said that ByteDance's business sensitivity is still top-notch. Because the hottest technology trend nowadays is nothing more than the combination of large models and hardware.

For example, in the first half of this year, the combination of large models and robots has made the humanoid robot race hot. In March of this year, in just four days, the market value of "the first stock of humanoid robots," UBTECH, surged by 78.79%.

Another example is the combination of large models and smart cars.

On May 16th of this year, Xiaomi's large model MiLM passed the filing and is gradually being applied to cars. In addition, on April 25th, 2024, XPeng Motors' AI Tianji system will go online; and on April 12th, 2024, NIO's NOMI-GPT will be launched.

Another example is the combination of PCs and large models.

On March 26th, 2024, Intel released a chip with a neural network processor that can support computers running 20 billion large models; while in October of last year, Lenovo released an AI PC.

Lastly, there is the combination of mobile phones and large models. Currently, the disclosed exploration manufacturers include Xiaomi and Huawei.

For example, in November of last year, vivo released the BlueLM large model, which is integrated into mobile phones; and in October of last year, Honor announced that it would equip its Magic6 series with large models.

Pencil News believes that the potential players in the combination of large models and mobile phones are not hardware manufacturers, but software companies aspiring to create a "large model operating system." This is a new type of operating system in the AI2.0 era that may replace Android or iOS.

In essence, an operating system is also a robot that executes various instructions on behalf of the user. However, in the AI1.0 era, its intelligence was limited and could only complete simple tasks.

"You press a button, and it completes a step. For some complex tasks, it requires clicking dozens or even half of the buttons, resulting in a poor user experience. One of the greatest potentials of large models is that it can perform complex integrated tasks. It has human thinking capabilities, rather than artificial intelligence," said Song Ming, an expert from Pencil News' think tank.

Therefore, theoretically speaking, under the advanced capabilities of large models, a new type of operating system (or solution) will certainly be created.

The business opportunities behind this are enormous. Taking Google as an example, Android has created a large number of users for it, and through products such as Google Play, Google Search, and the AdMob advertising platform, Google has made a fortune.

However, with the emergence of large models, the specific entry and exit points of traffic may change structurally, and traditional players (such as Google) may not be able to quickly adapt to these new changes. This gives companies like ByteDance unlimited opportunities.

Prior to this, some large companies have already launched large model operating systems. For example, on April 16th, 2024, DuerOS X, a new generation of AI operating system, was released by Xiaodu Technology, with its underlying technology originating from Baidu's large model Wenxin Yiyan.

Previously, one of Xiaodu's core businesses was to provide voice interaction solutions for hardware.

Considering the domestic competitive landscape, there has not yet been a sufficiently strong player in the combination of large models and operating systems, let alone a battle among the various players. ByteDance's entry at this moment has given it a certain advantage.

Which strong players will enter in the next 1-3 years? There are two types of companies: one is companies that have been paying attention to operating systems for a long time but are still waiting for an opportunity; the other is companies that have already achieved results in this race, such as Huawei (HarmonyOS).

How big will this market be?

Any company that successfully creates a mobile phone operating system will have a market value of tens of trillions of US dollars. Globally, iOS and Android occupy more than 70% of the market. In the past six months, Apple's market value has exceeded 3 trillion US dollars, and Google's market value has exceeded 2 trillion US dollars.

From this perspective, how big is the large model operating system market? Conservatively speaking, it is at least a trillion-dollar race.