Research Note

Abstract

LightCounting comments on Huawei’s Analyst Summit

by Zhou Xue and Tom William

Date May 7, 2024

Huawei’s most recent Analyst Summit was held in Shenzhen, China, on April 17-19, 2024. The event was themed “Thrive with Intelligence”, and it was all about artificial intelligence (AI) and how AI is driving change across Huawei’s business domains. The analysts in attendance learned about the many innovations in Huawei’s various solutions and products recently brought to market. At the grand opening of the event, the stunning virtual co-host, Sara, made her appearance with a 90-second introduction video. Sara introduced all the businesses, markets and applications covered by Huawei. Even more impressive was that the images and music in the video were all AI-generated and created by Huawei’s own large language model (LLM) Pangu3.0.

Zhou Hong, President of the Institute of Strategic Research at Huawei, opened his keynote with 4 directions that Huawei is advancing in: Computing, Connection, Control and Perception. Before discussing how to meet the increasing challenges of the rapidly growing demand for computing power, Zhou Hong made the audience take a moment to appreciate the energy efficiency of the human brain. He said that a human brain can do the equivalent of 30 petaflops of processing while consuming 20 Watts of power. This compares very favorably to a typical high-performance computer (HPC) which might do slightly over 1,000 petaflops of processing while consuming 20 Megawatts of power.

One of the suggestions that Zhou Hong shared is to take a systems engineering approach to AI development, “Applications are the ultimate targets of AI,” said Zhou Hong, based on the foundation large model, instead of building a few more large and expensive training models, Huawei will develop more industry and scenario-specific models and tools, and the ecosystem, to create more value and a better experience for the customer. Efficient and more affordable small and medium sized models are urgently needed to release AI’s value everywhere. These small models will be deployed at the edge to reach out and do more in the real world. Dr. Zhou Hong ended his presentation by saying repeatedly that “everything we imagine today is too little for tomorrow!” Truly the development of science and technology has no limits.

The Huawei Cloud’s Pangu models are now addressing over 200 scenarios across more than 10 industries. The Oil and Gas Industry’s pre-drilling survey process was shortened from 3 months to 1 week. Significant amounts of wind and solar generated power is being stored and redirected instead of being wasted. Data is being collected and analyzed from over 7 million connected BYD automobiles. Pangu models are making significant progress on developing new medicines, diagnosing patients, and generating reports that document clinical research. Both Western medicine and Chinese traditional medicine is being mastered by Pangu models. Weather forecasting, typhoon path prediction and air pollution tracking are all being done by Pangu as well.

Huawei Cloud has seen its number of worldwide developers grow from 4 million to 6 million, and the number of applications they have produced by now exceeds 12,000.

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