At the Dartmouth Conference in 1950, John McCarthy first proposed the term "artificial intelligence", marking the birth of AI as an independent research field. Since then, AI has experienced rapid development. In recent years, with the rapid improvement of computing power, the widespread application of big data, and the breakthrough of machine learning algorithms, AI is no longer limited to theoretical concepts, but has truly entered practical applications. stage, starting a wave of technological change.
Today, AI has widely penetrated into all walks of life. Fields such as self-driving cars, smart homes, medical diagnostics, and financial services have rapidly adopted AI technology, revolutionizing the way we live and work. Deep learning, in particular, simulates the processing methods of the human brain, allowing machines to make tremendous progress in visual recognition, language processing, and decision-making.
And API is becoming an important tool to promote the development of AI. Through APIs, more enterprises and developers can easily build AI-based products and services without having to develop their own AI models. This change has made AI technology more popular and accelerated the pace of innovation and development.
AI+API Economy and Priority Law
In the field of artificial intelligence, technology pioneers are opening up their capabilities and resources through APIs, establishing AI open platforms, gathering partners, expanding influence and realizing technology sinking. This initiative aims to create a more complete and diversified industrial ecosystem. The AI open platform allows developers to flexibly call APIs and quickly build and iterate products and services without large-scale investment in infrastructure. This economic model with an AI open platform as its core is called the "AI+API economy".
虽然AI+API经济还处于发展的初级阶段，但各类企业对这类API的需求正快速增长，为这个经济模式的扩张注入了动力。根据Gartner的预测，到2026年，超过80%的企业将采用生成式人工智能（GenAI）的APIs或模型，并将其部署到生产环境中，相较于2023年不到5%的使用率，这一增长将是显著的。这一趋势也预示着AI+API经济的迅速发展和广泛接受。
In this emerging economic model, "AI + API first" has become the core strategy for building artificial intelligence-driven products and services. This means that the design and development of the API is prioritized, and the development of other products or services is centered around the API. From a development perspective, the AI+API priority strategy brings the following main advantages:
- Accelerated innovation: Enterprises can quickly develop and iterate AI-supported functions by integrating existing artificial intelligence APIs, accelerating the product launch process.
- Scalability: The structure of AI+API can be expanded independently of the application itself, making it easier for enterprises to adapt to growing workloads and changing user needs.
- Cost efficiency: Building on existing AI capabilities reduces development costs and reduces reliance on deep AI expertise.
- User experience improvement: AI-enhanced applications can provide users with a more personalized and intelligent interactive experience, thereby improving user overall satisfaction and loyalty.
To sum up, the AI+API economy not only provides new growth opportunities for enterprises, but also brings the possibility of transformation to the entire industry by promoting the widespread application and innovation of technology.
AI+API-first companies are beginning to rise
We are in a new era where AI and APIs work together to drive business progress. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are driving the development of an “AI-first” approach to building products. These models demonstrate amazing natural language processing capabilities, capable of generating human-like conversations, summarizing text, performing language translation, and creating content after being trained on large amounts of text data.
然而，现有的LLM主要依赖于大量的数据和文本进行训练，其AI能力的发挥极大依赖于数据库。虽然这些模型本身不能直接与“现实世界”进行互动，但API在这一情境中扮演着关键的角色。API作为一个连接点，将LLM与实际应用场景相结合，提供了更加实用和全面的用户体验。此外，API边际成本随调用量增多而递减的特性尤为显著。这意味着随着调用量的增加，单个调用的成本相对降低，促进了更大规模的应用和更频繁的使用。
Image content source: iResearch
Initially, AI+API was mainly used to enhance traditional applications such as CRM systems or e-commerce platforms. But now, "AI native" companies are also emerging, and they use AI+API as the core to drive new products and businesses. For example, AI content generation platform using LLM API, virtual customer service assistant provided by conversation API, personalized recommendation engine built based on prediction API, etc. As AI APIs continue to improve in accuracy, coverage, and scalability, more industries are gradually turning to AI-first as their main development model.
Against this backdrop, more and more forward-thinking companies are realizing the potential of “AI first” strategies based on AI + APIs. Even small and medium-sized enterprises can easily integrate advanced AI functions into their product systems by integrating AI APIs, leaving the burden of AI development to be handled by API providers.
APIs will power the next era of AI
As artificial intelligence continues to mature, it is expected that more artificial intelligence APIs will emerge in the future. These APIs will serve as a bridge for enterprises to easily access AI capabilities without having to develop AI models from scratch. Such developments will make it easier for enterprises to get involved in the field of artificial intelligence while expanding the intelligence level of their applications. This progress will also rapidly promote the development of the AI+API economy. We can foresee that more standards for AI APIs will be developed to make it easier for enterprises to integrate various artificial intelligence APIs into their applications.
The AI+API economy marks that artificial intelligence is gradually transcending the limitations of isolated applications and moving towards an intelligent era that is composable, easy to access and rapidly improved. This model treats AI as an open platform, allowing software developers to easily add features such as conversational interfaces, accurate predictions, and automatically generated content to their applications.
While large language models mark the beginning of the AI revolution, what this means for end users is that as the models driving APIs continue to improve, AI will be seamlessly integrated into all aspects of life. The degree of integration with APIs will determine the next step. Winners and losers at a stage. Companies that fail to plan for this AI+API-driven future risk being left behind.
In this context, Power Simple Integration will take the lead in creating a resource-rich API resource library, which will include APIs required by various developers. It will help developers easily discover APIs and implement the AI+API strategy, and at the same time, it can Distribute your own unique API to more customers through the platform.
References:
AI-API economy with AI-API first approach
2020 China Artificial Intelligence API Economic White Paper | Interface News · JMedia