This is a flagship annual trend report titled “升维——2023 十大数字科技前沿应用趋势” (often rendered in English as “Top 10 Digital Technology Application Trends 2023”). It is presented as a formal research publication by Tencent Research Institute, and it is positioned as part of a broader knowledge-festival package of forward-looking technology reports. The report’s framing treats digital technology as a foundational driver for economic activity and social systems, and it argues that the defining pattern for 2023 is “升维,” meaning an observable shift toward higher-dimensional integration across previously separate technology layers and application domains.
Authorship is credited to a multi-author team: Liu Moxian, Wang Qiang, Yuan Yuan, Li Nan, Wang Peng, Li Ruilong, Xu Siyan, Song Yang, Bai Huitian, and Wu Pengyang. The report is described as drawing on representative progress and notable events from both academia and industry, using those signals to identify application-facing trends rather than only laboratory research directions. A prominent deliverable described in the report’s own presentation is a synthesized “technology tree” and “technology star map,” intended to communicate both lineage (how capabilities evolve) and emergence (where new clusters of capability are forming).
The analytical structure is organized around four dimensions: IT reshaping, the intelligent world, digital–physical symbiosis, and future networks. This four-part scaffold is used to group the “top ten” set of frontier application trends, so the report’s unit of analysis is less about single inventions and more about capability bundles that are reaching deployable maturity. The intended outcome is an interpretable map that helps readers see where application patterns are consolidating and where discontinuities are likely, with explicit emphasis on convergence across compute, platforms, security, and interaction.
Within IT reshaping, the report’s core narrative is that mature computing paradigms are entering a new phase of recombination: high-performance computing is described as moving toward fusion with quantum approaches, producing a “3.0” iteration logic rather than incremental scaling alone. The operating system layer is described as evolving toward a ubiquitous OS that supports collaboration among people, machines, and things across heterogeneous environments. Cloud computing is framed as having passed through cloud-native transformation and now trending toward new development paradigms that function as an industrial “fine-grained toolbox,” while digital security is framed as becoming more systematized through zero-trust approaches and threat-intelligence–driven, precision defense concepts.
Within the intelligent world dimension, the report highlights the migration of AI capabilities grounded in spatiotemporal data from experiments into operational physical contexts, particularly for city-scale systems where analysis, matching of supply and demand, and decision support can be made actionable. In parallel, it points to advances in flexible materials and sensing as enabling more capable tactile perception, and it connects this to an “interaction up-dimension” theme where richer embodied sensing and interaction expand feasible application spaces for physical-world automation and assistance.
Within future networks, the report situates Web3 as an architectural and infrastructural evolution driven by underlying components such as decentralized identity, scaling approaches like sharding, and cryptographic mechanisms such as zero-knowledge proofs, with the emphasis placed on improving identity management, performance, and trust properties of value exchange. It also introduces an “energy internet” trajectory, described as emerging from deeper digitization of energy networks alongside modularized hardware facilities and standardized interfaces, implying that network thinking extends beyond information networks into energy and infrastructure coordination.
Within digital–physical symbiosis, the report foregrounds digital humans as an interaction entry point for a 3D internet, arguing that production will industrialize rapidly and that AI-driven capabilities will accelerate their role as an interface between users and services. It also treats immersive online meetings and boundaryless collaboration as a pathway from merely being “online” to being “present,” framing this as a shift toward productivity-first digital work and as a driver for new knowledge co-creation patterns. Across the report’s dimensions, the unifying profile is not a single technology bet but a convergence thesis: more compute modalities, more pervasive platform layers, more formalized security, and more embodied interaction primitives are expected to co-evolve into application-ready systems that reshape how digital services are built, governed, and experienced.