Huawei's Perspective on AI Development in China Infrastructure, Innovation, and Industry Leadership
TapTechNews July 5th news, the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference opened yesterday at the Shanghai World Expo Center. Zhang Ping'an, Managing Director of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud, stated that China's AI development cannot be separated from the innovation of computing infrastructure, and we must be bold to open up industry scenarios to make AI take the lead in industry applications.
Zhang Ping'an said, 'We cannot rely on whether there is the most advanced supported AI chip for AI infrastructure. If not, we cannot take the lead in AI, and this view must be abandoned.'
No one will deny that we face problems of limited computing power in China...but we cannot simply rely on having an AI chip with an advanced manufacturing process node as the ultimate foundation of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Due to being included in the US Entity List, Huawei has been unable to purchase advanced chips from US companies such as NVIDIA. However, Huawei has developed its own Ascend (Sheng Teng) chip and an all-scenario AI computing framework, MindSpore. Currently, many companies in China are using this series of products to train AI models. However, compared with NVIDIA's latest products, even the AI computing power of Huawei Ascend has certain deficiencies.
Zhang Ping'an pointed out that Huawei's innovation direction is to release the AI computing power demand on the end side to the cloud through optical fibers and wireless networks, and obtain seamless AI computing power through end-cloud synergy. Through the computing power on the cloud side, the end side not only maintains rich functions but also greatly reduces power consumption and dependence on chips.
He emphasized that the path of China's AI development should be to pursue building a global leading position in large models in the industry field. If all industries actively embrace AI and actively open up industry business scenarios, China has a great chance to build a global leading advantage in the 2B (TapTechNews note: for enterprise customers) field.
At the 2024 Huawei Developer Conference held at the end of June, the Huawei Cloud Pangu Large Model 5.0 was officially released, which has carried out new upgrades in three aspects: 'full series, multi-modal, and strong thinking', and has provided more rich innovative applications and landing practices in fields such as autonomous driving, industrial design, architectural design, embodied intelligence, digital content production, high-speed rail, steel, meteorology, and medicine.
Take the steel industry as an example. At present, the Pangu Large Model has been launched on a hot-rolled production line of Baosteel, and the prediction accuracy of steel plates has been improved by 5%, and it is expected to produce 20,000 more tons of steel plates every year, increasing revenue by more than 90 million yuan.