Huawei: Reshaping Industries with AI as the Cloud Foundation for an Intelligent World
[Shanghai, China, September 21, 2023] The second day of HUAWEI CONNECT 2023 started with the keynote speech by Mr. Zhang Ping’an, Executive Director of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud. In “The Cloud Foundation for an Intelligent World: Reshaping Industries with AI”, he announced Huawei’s Pangu models for mining, government, vehicles, weather, medicine, virtual humans, and R&D, as well as the brand-new Huawei Cloud Ascend AI Cloud Service. These products and solutions demonstrate Huawei Cloud’s efforts in promoting cloud-powered AI across industries.
Mr. Zhang Ping’an said that Pangu focuses on customers’ most pressing needs. Looking back the HDC.Cloud in this July, Huawei Cloud released Pangu Models 3.0. Its 5+N+X decoupling architecture and layered AI capabilities support many models and applications.
HUAWEI CONNECT is where Huawei Cloud further extends Pangu models into mining, government, vehicles, weather, medicine, virtual humans, and R&D. For example, the Pangu Vehicle Model automatically generates samples for complex driving scenarios using digital twins. This brings the over two weeks an autonomous driving system needs to learn new corner cases down to under two days. Shandong Energy Group adopted the Pangu Mine Model in nine processes and 21 scenarios, including digging, drivage, equipment control, transport, ventilation, and coal washing. The Group’s No. 2 coal mine in Jining now produces an additional 8,000 tons of cleaned coal each year.
In his speech, Mr. Zhang announced the launch of Huawei Cloud Ascend AI cloud service, available for purchase and use on the Huawei Cloud website from the day on. This cloud service offers a variety of ready-to-call AI models to boost wider AI adoption. Huawei Cloud has built three AI computing centers in Gui’an, Ulanqab, and Wuhu. Enterprises have unlimited access to Ascend-powered AI computing. In addition, a dedicated zone for foundation models of Ascend AI cloud service is now officially available on the Huawei Cloud website. Enterprise users and developers can use mainstream open-source models such as LLaMA and GLM directly.
“We tackle big challenges head-on.” According to Zhang Ping’an, Huawei Cloud has sent PhDs, experts, and scientists to the field over the past several years to help enterprises operationalize the latest technologies in construction sites, mines, and manufacturing workshops. So far, Huawei has helped more than 1,000 enterprises create real value from intelligent projects. This year, 200 PhDs are set to visit customer sites to bridge the gap between intelligent technology and industry needs, paving the way for customers to digital and intelligence.
In his speech, Bruno Zhang, Huawei Cloud CTO, pointed out that foundation models and their applications require software/hardware system engineering of unprecedented complexity. Innovation is continuous.
Huawei Cloud embarks on systematic software and hardware innovation for AI from the system architecture, data processing, model training, application development, and AI cloud service layers, aiming to become the cloud of choice for the AI era.
These innovative services are deployed across clouds, networks, edges, and devices. Public cloud, edge cloud, and hybrid cloud are all available for deployment and implementation. Suppose an enterprise needs a dedicated AI platform and versatile foundation models. In that case, Ascend AI cloud service and key foundation models work with existing data centers using Huawei Cloud Stack, a hybrid cloud platform. At the event, Bruno announced Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3 with mainstream availability by the end of September.
