Speaking at the 21st Huawei Analyst Summit (HAS) in Shenzhen last week, Xu said Huawei aims to progress along multiple tracks – the first is to drive advancements in AI and build thriving ecosystems, and the second involves using AI to enhance the competitiveness of the company’s products and solutions.
Ready-to-call AI models
Huawei’s aim is to embrace intelligence with its ready-to-call AI models and its Pangu models, which are trained to address industry-specific challenges.
The Pangu Weather Model, for example, is an AI model for global weather forecasting, now available on the website of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
On this website, global weather forecasters, meteorologists and the general public can view Pangu-Weather’s 10-day global weather forecasts for free.
The ECMWF website shows the forecasts made by Pangu-Weather in six different types of charts, including: mean sea level pressure and 850 hPa wind speed, 500 hPa geopotential height and 850 hPa temperature, mean sea level pressure and 200 hPa wind, temperature and geopotential at various pressure levels, 2 m temperature and 10 m wind speed, wind speed and geopotential heights at various pressure levels.
All of this information is critical to predicting the development of weather systems, storm trajectories, air quality, and weather patterns. ECMWF recently used Pangu-Weather to successfully predict the path of Typhoon DOKSURI which landed in southern China in July.
As part of its continuing AI strategy, the company is integrating AI into its internal management to boost efficiency, while investing in AI basic research to promote ongoing innovation.
Huawei says it will continue to engage in global AI governance and implement effective governance throughout all product design and pre-launch activities.
Towards the end of his speech, Xu said: "In October 2018, we officially unveiled our AI strategy and Full-Stack, All-Scenario AI Portfolio. Since then, we've been pressing ahead with this strategy, developing all manner of AI solutions in our advance towards All Intelligence."
On top of the AI developments, Xu urged developers and owners in its native China to join Huawei’s HarmonyOS-native app ecosystem.
“In 2024, one of our key objectives is to build up the HarmonyOS-native app ecosystem,” he said.
“In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99% of their time on about 5,000 apps.
“So, we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS. More than 4,000 of these 5,000 apps are already in the process of moving over.”
The chairman says the company is still in discussions with developers on the 1,000 or so apps that remain, and while this is a massive undertaking, the company has “broad support in the industry and from several app developers.
“Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of other apps – up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world.”
“We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world.”
