The Moore's Law that sets the pace of the semiconductor development can last two more generations, as the process technology may hit bottlenecks after advancing to 3nm node from the existing 7nm and future 5nm nodes, Tsai Ming-kai, chairman of Taiwan's leading IC designer MediaTek, has said.

Tsai made the comments in a November 21 talk with Alibaba's chief technology officer Wang Jian. He said that along with the ever-advancing computing technologies and performance and the ever-expanding data flow, new business opportunities associated with solving human problems through data applications will emerge anytime and anywhere for those pursuing innovations and tech startups.

Semiconductor as most basic infrastructures

Tsai said from the "offline" era to the current "online" era, the global semiconductor industry has been serving as the most fundamental infrastructure to constantly provide innovation momentums for online development of all the business and industrial sectors.

While offering the most basic infrastructure for online operations, networks can constantly accumulate more and more information, and if the information can be converted into useful data, new business opportunities will emerge for those engaged in innovations and new ventures although certain risks will follow.

For his part, Alibaba's Wang said that the "Being Online" principle contains three key elements: First, each and every piece of data available in the world will become meaningful only after it is converted for (Internet of Things) applications; second, the data in circulation will become valuable only through the interflow of people's ideas; and third, the data in flow must be able to be computed. In this regard, Wang said that Uber has realized a typical innovation by converting what users have in mind into an IoT in the form of ride-hailing apps.

Machine intelligence vs artificial intelligence

Wang said the commonly-used term "artificial intelligence" (AI) had better be corrected as "machine intelligence," as the former refers to using computing technologies to deal with what human beings have known while the latter is used to handle what the mankind cannot do, such as calculating the number of vehicles moving on city roads.

He said after all devices can be connected to networks, the data and information generated from the Internet connections should not just be collected, and instead, useful data and information should also be sorted out and developed into a new business model. For instance, Wang continued, Google collects all kinds of online data and then offers advertisements to consumers in accordance with netizens' browsing habits and hits, thus developing a new business model. In contrast, as a software developer, Microsoft also owns tremendous data, yet without massive applications.