2023 Top 10 Hot Sectors Announced: AIGC Leads with Over 60% Annual Growth - In-Depth AIGC Industry Research

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2023 marked a banner year for thematic investments in China's A-share market, with the AI wave persisting throughout. Whether in hardware segments like CPO and computing power or application areas such as AIGC, market fervor was consistently amplified. In the latter half of the year, Huawei-related concepts staged a strong rally, with sectors like Huawei smartphones, Huawei automotive, and HarmonyOS successively taking center stage. Additionally, robotic reducers, data rights confirmation, and short-video game sectors emerged as unignorable hotspots for investors. In terms of growth performance, the AIGC sector dominated with a staggering 63.41% surge, while the CPO sector also achieved over 50% annual growth.

Generative AI (AIGC) represents a pivotal milestone in the transition from AI 1.0 to 2.0. The convergence of technologies including GAN, CLIP, Transformer, Diffusion, pre-trained models, multimodal systems, and generative algorithms has catalyzed AIGC's explosive growth. Continuous algorithmic innovation, qualitative leaps in AIGC capabilities enabled by pre-trained models, and multimodal expansion driving content diversification have endowed AIGC with more universal and robust foundational capabilities. From computational intelligence through perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence, AIGC has now unlocked the gateway to cognitive intelligence for human society. Through training on massive singular datasets, AI systems now assimilate cross-domain knowledge - requiring only targeted model fine-tuning to accomplish real-world tasks.

The AIGC industry chain comprises three primary segments: Upstream involves foundational logic development and algorithmic data provisioning, including data providers, creator ecosystems, underlying tools, and open-source algorithms. Midstream focuses on content generation encompassing text generation, image synthesis, digital humans, and related outputs. Downstream centers on content applications and the deployment of model algorithms.

AIGC represents a milestone for human society and artificial intelligence. In the short term, it transforms fundamental productivity tools; in the medium term, it alters social production relations; and in the long term, it drives qualitative breakthroughs in overall societal productivity. Within these transformations of productivity tools, production relations, and productivity itself, the value of data as a production factor is greatly amplified. AIGC elevates data to the status of a core resource of our era, accelerating the process of digital transformation across society to some extent.

AIGC Industry Market Development Status: In-Depth Research and Analysis

According to statistics, China's digital economy reached approximately 50 trillion yuan in 2022 and is expected to grow to 56.1 trillion yuan in 2023, reflecting the significant progress of China's digital economy. As the scale of China's digital economy continues to expand, digital consumption models are becoming more widely accepted by consumers. Meanwhile, enterprises are increasingly joining the digital transformation movement, creating opportunities for the AIGC industry.

With the continuous iteration of deep learning models, AIGC has achieved breakthrough progress. Particularly in 2022, algorithms experienced explosive growth, and breakthroughs in underlying technologies made the commercial application of AIGC feasible. These advancements have been concentrated in the field of AI-generated art: in June 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were introduced. In February 2021, OpenAI launched the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) multimodal pre-training model. By 2022, Diffusion Models gradually began replacing GANs.

AIGC is an artificial intelligence technology built on multimodal capabilities, meaning a single model can simultaneously understand language, images, videos, audio, and perform tasks that unimodal models cannot accomplish, such as adding text descriptions to videos or generating images based on semantic context. Currently, domestic AIGC applications mostly appear as single-model implementations, primarily divided into text generation, image generation, video generation, and audio generation, with text generation serving as the foundation for other content generation.

The AI industry chain mainly consists of three layers: the foundational layer, technical layer, and application layer. The foundational layer focuses on building support platforms, including sensors, AI chips, data services, and computing platforms. The technical layer emphasizes core technology R&D, mainly comprising algorithm models, basic frameworks, and general technologies. The application layer focuses on industrial applications, including industry solution services, hardware products, and software products. Research shows that China's AIGC industry chain structure primarily consists of five parts: foundational large models, industry/scenario medium models, business/domain small models, AI infrastructure, and AIGC support services, forming a comprehensive ecosystem.

Internationally, AIGC commercialization starts with foundational large models, with typical applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney being incubated through calls to these large models. Domestically, the situation is reversed. Due to China's extremely rich business scenarios and highly fragmented supply-side services, current AIGC commercialization begins with business/domain small models. Foundational large models are still in a phase of rapid iteration and upgrading while starting to focus on specific business scenarios. The industry/scenario medium model market is relatively more delayed, but in China's unique market context, this will become an area where both foundational large models and domain small models actively cross over in the future.

According to data, the core market size of China's AIGC industry in 2022 was 1.15 billion yuan, projected to reach 7.93 billion yuan in 2023 and 166.53 billion yuan by 2026. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, AIGC technology is also maturing. AIGC experienced a surge at the end of 2022, driven by the interplay of data, algorithms, and computing power, leading to the gradual awakening of AI's "creative intelligence." As AI technology continues to advance and break through, generative AI is accelerating its penetration into fields such as text, images, and audio-video content. The AIGC sector is attracting new tech giants. In February 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would establish a top-tier product team focused on AIGC. Google's streaming platform YouTube also announced the development of AIGC content creation tools. Previously, overseas giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Buzzfeed had already laid out related service products.

AIGC Industry Market Future Development Trends and Potential Prediction

China's artificial intelligence industry has entered a phase of explosive growth, driven by collective efforts from all sides, with enormous market development potential. Data shows that the core industry scale of China's AI sector reached 150 billion yuan in 2020 and is expected to reach 400 billion yuan by 2025, potentially becoming the world's largest AI market. The existence of AIGC will greatly unleash human imagination, ushering in a "new art wave" of this era.