Artificial intelligence to influence top tech trends in major way in next five years

Artificial intelligence will be the common theme in the top 10 technology trends in the next few years, and these are expected to quicken breakthroughs across key economic sectors and society, the Alibaba Damo Academy says.

The global research arm of Chinese technology major Alibaba Group says innovation will be extended from the physical world to a mixed reality, as more innovation finds its way to industrial applications and digital technology drives a green and sustainable future.

"Digital technologies are growing faster than ever," Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and head of Alibaba Damo, said in a report released on Monday. "The advancements in digitisation, 'internetisation' and intelligence are redefining a digital world that is characterised by the prevalence of mixed reality.

"Digital technology plays an important role in powering a green and sustainable future, whether it is applied in industries such as green data centres and energy-efficient manufacturing, or in day-to-day activities like paperless office."

The report was compiled after analysing millions of public papers and patent filings over the past three years and conducting interviews with about 100 scientists. The rapid development of new network technology will fuel the evolution of cloud computing towards a new system called cloud-network-device convergence. The system will allow clouds, networks and devices to have a more clearly defined division of labour.

Clouds will function as “brains” and will be responsible for centralised computing and global data processing, while networks will serve as the interconnecting “tracks” that join various forms of networks on the cloud to build an ubiquitous, low-latency network.

The global cloud computing market is projected to grow to $947.3 billion by 2026, from $445.3bn in 2021, according to data platform Markets and Markets, with adoption set to increase in sectors where initiatives to work from home are prevalent.

AI would be a boon to scientists, with Alibaba Damo saying it will replace computers as the main production tool in scientific discovery, helping to improve efficiency in each phase of the research process – from the formation of initial hypothesis to experimental procedures and the distillation of experimental findings. aliThis will shorten research cycles and improve the productivity of scientists.

Machine learning can process massive amounts of multidimensional and multimodal data and solve complex scientific problems, allowing scientific exploration to flourish in areas previously thought impossible, it said. As such, AI will also help to discover new scientific laws.

The global scientific research and development services sector is, unsurprisingly, a big market. The sector is forecast to grow to $822.49bn this year and $1.3 trillion by 2026, from $725.56bn in 2021, data provider ReportLinker says.