Huawei's AI strategy and product portfolio have landed. Think full-stack, inclusive, and all-scenario. Find out the details.
By Eric Xu, Huawei Rotating Chairman
Despite two AI winters when funding and interest in AI research reduced sharply, AI has never stopped advancing. However, we can't fully unleash its value unless we define its positioning.
AI is a combination of technologies that together form a new general purpose technology (GPT), as much as the wheel, railways, and electricity were in their time. AI will help us find more efficient solutions to problems we’ve already fixed, help us solve problems that are as yet unsolved, and reduce costs through automation – one of AI’s most valuable characteristics.
Although AI will change every industry, its adoption is still in its early stages: only 4 percent of enterprises have invested in or deployed AI; just 5 percent of smart city implementations are using AI; and the supply and demand ratio of AI talent worldwide is only 1 percent.
Nevertheless, the gaps are the driving forces that will push the industry forward. And to close these gaps, we need the right tech, talent, and industry ecosystem. That's why Huawei announced its AI strategy and its full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio at HUAWEI CONNECT 2018 – a portfolio that can provide abundant and affordable computing power for all.
By "all-scenario", we mean all deployment scenarios for AI, including public clouds, private clouds, edge computing in all forms, industrial IoT devices, and consumer devices. By "full-stack", we mean the functionality of our technology – our portfolio includes chips, chip enablement, a training and inference framework, and application enablement.
Our AI strategy is to invest in basic research and talent development, promote a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio, and foster an open global ecosystem. We will continue to explore how to improve management and efficiency with AI. In the telecom sector, we aim to adopt SoftCOM AI to make network O&M more efficient. In the consumer market, HiAI will infuse intelligence into consumer devices, making them smarter than ever. Huawei Cloud EI public cloud services and FusionMind private cloud solutions will provide abundant and affordable computing power for all organizations – especially businesses and governments – and help them use AI with greater ease. Our portfolio will also include an AI acceleration card, AI server, AI appliance, and many other products.
Huawei is committed to working closely with our customers, partners, and academia to grow together, promote pervasive AI, and ultimately build a fully connected, intelligent world.
