Highlights of DataFunCon 2024 Beijing: Big Data, AI, and Large‑Model Trends

On July 5, the two‑day DataFunCon 2024 Beijing conference opened at the Liting Huayuan Hotel, themed “Big Data·Large Models·Dual‑Core Era,” attracting hundreds of experts, scholars, executives, and enthusiasts from across China to explore frontier technologies and practical applications.

In the main forum, Alibaba Cloud researcher and product lead Xu Sheng delivered a keynote titled “Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Big Data Evolution,” outlining the transition from data lakes to lake‑warehouses and the integration of big data with AI, and highlighting Alibaba Cloud’s global capacity of processing ~2.8 EB of data daily across 30 regions and 89 zones.

Xu emphasized that big data, search, and AI are now converging, and Alibaba Cloud aims to use lake‑warehouse technology to support large‑model development and create innovative products for enterprises.

ProtonBase researcher Jiang Xiaowei then presented “Distributed Data Warehouse – Let Data Emerge Intelligence,” explaining the DIKW model (Data‑Information‑Knowledge‑Wisdom) and how distributed data warehouses transform raw data into valuable insights and eventually wisdom.

Professor Zhao Xin from Renmin University’s Gaoling AI Institute delivered “Rethinking Large‑Model Technology,” covering language‑model capabilities, data resource construction, evaluation methods, and stressing the importance of high‑quality data, scalable training architectures, cost‑effective learning, and model extensibility.

The closing round‑table, hosted by DataFun founder Wang Dachuan, featured Xu Sheng, Zhao Xin, and Cloud‑Tech CTO Guan Tao discussing “From Emergence to Value Emergence: Trends in Large‑Model Development,” offering strategies for enterprises to adopt large models effectively.

Key takeaways included rapid large‑model progress, the need for massive investment for next‑generation models, global application cases in autonomous driving, chatbots, and recommendation systems, and the importance of data as a differentiator for non‑leading enterprises.

Wang Dachuan also shared DataFun’s growth from a small community to China’s leading data‑intelligence developer hub, emphasizing a “benefit‑first” operating philosophy and future plans for media, conferences, and corporate training.

Throughout the day, six sub‑forums such as “Re‑architecting Data Infrastructure,” “AB Testing and Causal Inference,” and “Large‑Model Fine‑Tuning” offered deep dives into big‑data and AI trends, while partners like Alibaba Cloud, Yunqi Technology, and Alluxio showcased their solutions at bustling exhibition booths.

Images of the venue, speaker stages, and exhibition areas captured the vibrant atmosphere of the event.

The first day concluded with a successful wrap‑up, and the agenda for the next day promises further sessions on data governance, AI‑driven marketing, AIOps, multi‑cloud architectures, RAG retrieval, AI agents, and real‑time lake‑warehouse insights.