Huawei’s annual Developer Conference kicked off on July 7 in Dongguan, the manufacturing hub in China’s southern Guangdong province.
The booming AI industry was the focus of this year’s event, which saw developers from 30 regions across China and 10 different countries gather to discuss emerging opportunities and applications of the technology as well as reflect on their experiences in the field so far.
In his keynote speech Zhang Ping’an, executive chairman and CEO of Huawei Cloud, unveiled the company’s latest contributions – Huawei Cloud Pangu Models 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services.
Pangu is a large-scale model, the same technology that underpins ChatGPT. The hierarchical architecture of Pangu 3.0 means it can be quickly adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, and customers even have the option to train the model on their own datasets, making it highly generalisable across industries.
In a subtle jab at Open AI’s world-storming product ChatGPT (as well as other AI chat bot like Baidu’s Ernie), Zhang said Pangu 3.0 is not designed for “writing poems”, but for “empowering and reshaping” industries.
“Pangu models were born to serve industry-specific needs, and we are here to help customers from every industry to develop and use large models to solve their problems in ways never seen before,” Zhang said.
Huawei’s self-developed AI models are already being deployed in a wide range of industries, including finance, manufacturing, and research and development of medicines. Pangu’s models have already been put to work to improve the safety of China’s 155,000km of railways. With the ability to detect major faults at an accuracy rate of 99.99%, Pangu beats out manual fault detection which is labour-intensive and comparatively inefficient.
Huawei has also authored a research paper on the application of its model for weather prediction, which was published in the world-renowned scientific journal Nature. According to Huawei, the Pangu Meteorology model, which generates hourly high-resolution 3D weather forecasts, is the first AI to be able to forecast weather more accurately than conventional methods.
The newly launched Ascend AI cloud services are intended to undergird Pangu models with long-term and stable computing power. These platforms are optimised for AI model development and running, helping to train AI models faster than popular processing units.
