IDC: The scale of the artificial intelligence market reached US$2.18 billion in the first half of 2021, a year-on-year increase of 42.2%

The speech and semantics market grew 45.0% in the first half of 2021 compared with the same period last year, with a market size of US$940 million. The leading manufacturers are still dominated by large players, and the top three manufacturers include iFlytek, Alibaba Cloud, and Baidu Smart Cloud. The market share of Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Smart Cloud is gradually approaching iFlytek-Alibaba Cloud maintains outstanding advantages in intelligent voice, conversational AI, and natural language processing, and Baidu Smart Cloud still has a clear advantage in the field of NLP. It is expected that in the next few years, the continued investment and commercialization capabilities of major Internet companies in speech and semantics will help them gain a higher market share.

The machine learning platform market continued to grow rapidly in the first half of 2021, with a market size of US$260 million, an increase of 101.8% over the same period last year. The driving force behind this period's market growth is, on the one hand, the construction of AI middleware by traditional government and enterprise customers; on the other hand, it is also due to the continuous investment of manufacturers in AutoML and other technologies that lower the threshold for machine learning. Fourth Paradigm still maintains its leading position in this market, Huawei Cloud has also achieved rapid growth, followed by Jiuzhang Cloud and Innovation AInnoV. Of course, there are many innovative corporate participants in this market, such as TransRing Technology, Tianyun Big Data, etc.

While the market is developing steadily and mainstream application scenarios are being implemented on a large scale, many innovative applications can also be seen. For example, AI digital humans upgrade traditional intelligent customer service and replace human employees in knowledge-intensive fields; digital twins simulate and visualize the reconstruction of traffic, factories and other scenes to support human employees to communicate and collaborate based on more complex and richer data, etc. Of course, innovation in application scenarios is inseparable from technological breakthroughs. It is expected that in the next 3-5 years, new technologies such as automated machine learning, knowledge computing, digital twins, intelligent decision-making, document-based AI, federated learning, edge intelligence, and super-large pre-trained models will accelerate the exploration of the incremental market for artificial intelligence and drive the arrival of the intelligent world.