Huawei’s new offering in the AI segment includes a new series of chips
Chinese vendor Huawei has unveiled the company’s new artificial intelligence strategy as well as its AI portfolio.
The announcement was made by Huawei’s rotating Chairman Eric Xu during the Huawei Connect event, which takes place in Shanghai this week.
Huawei’s AI portfolio includes a new Ascend series of AI chips, as well as new products and cloud services that are built on Ascend chip capabilities.
The Chinese company highlighted that AI has become a new general-purpose technology, and it expects AI to change all industries and organizations on earth.
“Huawei’s AI strategy is to invest in basic research and talent development, build a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio, and foster an open global ecosystem,” said Xu during his keynote. “Within Huawei, we will continue exploring ways to improve management and efficiency with AI. In the telecom sector, we will adopt SoftCOM AI to make network [operations and maintenance] more efficient. In the consumer market, HiAI will bring true intelligence to our consumer devices, making them smarter than ever. Our Huawei 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’s AI strategy has five areas of focus:
-Invest in AI research: Develop fundamental capabilities for machine learning in domains like computer vision, natural language processing, and decision/inference.
-Build a full-stack AI portfolio, providing an easy-to-use AI platform with full-pipeline services and making the portfolio adaptive to all scenarios, both standalone and cooperative scenarios between cloud, edge, and device.
-Develop an open ecosystem through collaboration with global academia, industries, and partners.
-Strengthen existing portfolio through the launch of an AI mindset and techniques into existing products and solutions to create greater value and enhance competitive strengths.
-Drive operational efficiency at Huawei by applying AI to massive volumes of routine business activities for better efficiency and quality.
Xu also said that Huawei’s full-stack AI portfolio will speed up AI adoption in all industries to provide pervasive intelligence.
As part of its full-stack AI portfolio, Huawei unveiled the Ascend AI IP and chip series. Huawei said the Ascend series delivers “excellent performance per watt in every scenario, whether it’s minimum energy consumption or maximum computing power in data centers.” The vendor also said that the new, unified architecture makes it easy to deploy, migrate, and interconnect AI applications across different scenarios.
Huawei’s full-stack portfolio includes chips, chip enablement, a training and inference framework, and application enablement.
Huawei’s Xu believes that there will be a conflict between technology development and society in the initial phases of AI deployments, particularly as it is adopted more widely in the workplace, Mobile World Live reported.
“Existing policies, corporate processes and workforces are built around older technologies. The broader social environment is not yet ready for the AI era (…) “Every one of us needs to ask ourselves: ‘How will AI reshape or disrupt the industry I’m working in?” Xu was quoted as saying.
