An unspoken reality is that as chip manufacturing enters the 3nm era, the semiconductor industry will find it difficult to witness new revolutions in the near future.

When the revered "Moore's Law" begins to falter, and hardware devices such as cameras, screens, and batteries gradually become homogenized, what becomes the decisive factor in differentiating mobile phones? I believe the answer lies in systems and ecosystems.

On October 10, Beijing time, the 2024 vivo Developer Conference was held at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, with the theme of "United Hearts, United Journeys." At the conference, vivo unveiled its comprehensively upgraded self-developed BlueCore Large Model Matrix, OriginOS 5, BlueOS 2, and the latest achievements in ecological cooperation. The highlight of the event was the official announcement of vivo's new AI strategy – "BlueCore Intelligence."

According to the conference, BlueCore Intelligence represents the deep integration of large model technology with mobile operating systems, aiming to provide users with a more natural and intuitive interaction experience, delivering a smarter and warmer user experience. To achieve this goal, vivo will continue to evolve along three major directions: reshaping the interaction experience between humans and devices, transforming the service experience between humans and the digital world, and redefining the communication experience between humans and the physical world.

As the most direct carrier of these three paths, the system undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in determining the user experience.

01. New System + Large Model Matrix: vivo Delivers a Powerful Combination

On November 29, 2018, the first vivo Developer Conference (VDC) with the theme of "Openness and Empowerment" was held in Beijing. As vivo's "trial run," its significance lay primarily in conveying to the industry and developers vivo's determination and technology to build a new ecosystem based on AI. However, aside from this, the conference lacked a clear, overarching theme.

Since the unveiling of the Origin OS system at the second vivo Developer Conference, VDC has maintained a consistent main thread. At each subsequent conference, vivo has introduced new versions of the Origin OS system, showcasing its latest breakthroughs in user experience, performance optimization, security, and privacy.

By integrating current technological trends and market demands, such as AI, 5G communication, and IoT connectivity, vivo has not only demonstrated its in-depth exploration and innovative practices in these areas but also proven its leading position in the field of smartphone operating systems to the world, providing developers and partners with broader cooperation opportunities.

This year's conference was no exception.

For a long time, users' perception of system fluency was largely based on whether the system lagged or not. However, in the era of AI-powered phones, fluency is no longer solely about speed.

In terms of fluency, OriginOS 5 has created a comprehensive fluency experience encompassing lighting effects, interaction, form factor switching, and scene transitions, with over 1000 fluency optimizations.

The fundamental logic behind this achievement lies at the system's core level. For the first time, OriginOS 5 introduces an unfair GPU scheduling mechanism that intelligently allocates GPU resources, significantly enhancing the fluency of foreground applications. On the memory front, it innovatively introduces the Ledger memory ledger mechanism, a first in the Android space, enabling precise system-level memory resource scheduling, unified allocation and management of memory resources, and effectively reducing the burden on applications. Additionally, it intelligently constructs a memory ledger to dynamically optimize memory allocation based on actual application scenarios, ensuring efficient utilization of every byte of memory in the phone.

Ultimately, system fluency must be manifested on the screen. As vivo's exclusive display enhancement technology, OriginOS 5's virtual graphics card integrates three core technologies: a rapid response animation architecture, a synthesis rendering accelerator, and a graphics link collaboration engine, comprehensively optimizing the entire link experience from touch to feedback interface.

However, compared to the fluency of using apps, OriginOS 5 stands out even more for its seamless integration of naturalness and intuition in user interface interaction. "Natural and comfortable, intuitive" was the slogan shouted at the conference, but it must be emphasized that naturalness does not necessarily equate to intuition. A natural user interface must align with human usage logic and behavioral habits.

Numerous functions in OriginOS 5 support global invocation. For example, to summon the AI assistant "BlueCore XiaoV," the most common method is to long-press the power button, but it can also be done through voice commands, a double-finger long-press, or a long-press on the bottom navigation bar of the screen.

Moreover, OriginOS 5 introduces a brand-new upgrade to the "Atomic Island" feature. In addition to its notification capabilities, it leverages BlueCore XiaoV's powerful intent recognition capabilities. Simply drag and drop text, images, or other content onto the Atomic Island, and it will analyze and identify the user's current needs, proactively providing post-service options such as travel, shopping, and food delivery.

Naturally, realizing these functions relies heavily on the assistance of AI large models.

At last year's developer conference, vivo unveiled the BlueCore Large Model Matrix, consisting of three parameter scales (billions, tens of billions, and hundreds of billions) and comprising five language large models. vivo was also the first in the industry to successfully deploy end-side large models of 1B, 7B, and 13B, simultaneously introducing BlueCore XiaoV and BlueCore QianXun apps based on the BlueCore Large Model. In November last year, the BlueCore Large Model ranked first in overall performance on multiple large model benchmarks such as SuperCLUE, CMMLU, and C-EVAL.

At this year's developer conference, vivo announced a new self-developed BlueCore Large Model Matrix, comprehensively upgrading both language large models and end-side large model capabilities. In terms of language large models, the hundreds-of-billions-level BlueCore Cloud Large Model focuses on optimizing intent understanding and distribution, as well as task planning capabilities. Compared to last year, its overall capabilities have improved by 30%, continuing to lead the domestic first tier on the SuperCLUE and C-EVAL rankings.

Indeed, as systems and technologies evolve, Metcalfe's Law suggests that the usefulness of a network increases exponentially with the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of a platform increases as the number of users grows. With a vast user base accumulated, vivo has begun to contemplate how to bring more value to developers in the future.

As ecosystem construction becomes the core of hardware-software integration, helping developers extend the lifecycle of their products and services and create more value and revenue is not only its value proposition but also the central theme of the second half of platform ecosystem construction.

Following vivo's initial release of its self-developed BlueRiver Operating System (BlueOS) in November last year, BlueOS 2 made its debut at this year's developer conference with upgraded capabilities. As the industry's first operating system fully written in the Rust programming language, it is equipped with a real-time operating system kernel written in Rust – the BlueRiver Kernel.

From its inception, BlueRiver has integrated the BlueCore Large Model Matrix, supporting flexible end-to-cloud deployment of BlueCore Large Models with different parameters and various AI algorithms, including vision and speech recognition. In terms of ecosystem, BlueRiver is compatible with the hapjs fast application standard incubated by the OpenAtom Foundation. Meanwhile, vivo has introduced a brand-new BlueRiver UI framework for developers, enabling a consistent experience across different screen sizes with just one development effort based on adaptive UI layout.

02. Committed and Steadfast, Subtly Influencing the World

Water is good at nourishing all things without strife, embodying vivo's product strategy and original intention over the years. Always driven by consumer needs, vivo persists in delivering the ultimate product experience.

Within its long-term vision, providing long-term value to users is the most crucial aspect. OriginOS's achievements in an increasingly competitive market environment stem not only from over a decade of deep technical exploration but also from a commitment to long-term values.

As early as the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Zhou Wei, President of vivo AI Global Research Institute, predicted that the mobile phone industry would undergo a transformation in two years, evolving into a "self-learning, self-indexing, and self-recommending smart terminal." Since then, AI has become another major bet for vivo, following imaging.

Adhering to a minimalist long-term vision and win-win mindset at the corporate strategic level, vivo focuses on developing products that evoke "emotional fluctuations" in users at the market level, turning once-cold technologies into a colorful experience for users.

This is the significance of a "people-oriented" enterprise's existence.

*Images in the lead and throughout the article are sourced from the internet.