Inspur Information Liu Jun: The core of digital-real fusion is AI, and the metacosm needs new infrastructure

BEIJING APRIL 2, 2022 /PRNEWS/ -- Accelerating the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, empowering the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, and spawning new industries, new formats and new models have become the main line of China's digital economy development. As China's digital economy shifts to a new stage of deepening application, standardized development, and inclusive sharing, digital infrastructure construction and industrial ecological development are constantly ushering in new opportunities and challenges.

As the world's leading new IT infrastructure provider, Inspur Information is accelerating the "integration of digital reality" from the aspects of computing power, algorithm and ecology, liu Jun, vice president of Inspur Information and general manager of AI &HPC product line, elaborated on it at the IPF2022 press conference.

The following is based on the transcript of the interview.

The core of digital-real fusion is TO

AI industrialization and industrial AI look at the future from the perspective of intelligent transformation and intelligent industry. When put into the more ambitious process of digital-real fusion, we will find that intelligence is actually the goal of digital-real fusion. Why? Because we hope that the in-depth integration of digital technology and the real economy and real industry will enable the role of digital technology to be fully utilized and the production efficiency and operation capacity of the real industry can be improved. Digitalization alone cannot completely improve industrial capacity and the real economy with higher quality. The purpose of digitalization is to be intelligent.

AI is the core of the integration of digital reality, but to achieve AI, it is first necessary to help the real economy to achieve digitalization, which is an important relationship between the two. This year's government work report mentions the development of smart cities and digital villages - for cities that already have a digital foundation, the wisdom is the goal, and for the countryside, it is first necessary to achieve digitalization.

Therefore, the purpose of digital integration and digital economy is to be intelligent. Intelligence can greatly release productivity and accelerate the process of high-quality economic development, which is the core relationship between understanding the integration of digital reality and AI.

The meta-brain ecology is the ecology of the fusion of number and reality

Inspur Information proposed the meta-brain ecology in 2019, with the goal of promoting AI industrialization and industrial AI, empowering AI innovation to thousands of industries, and promoting the transformation and development of industrial wisdom.

Today, we have a deeper understanding. The core goal of industrial AI is to promote the combination of the real economy of the industry, digital technology and intelligent technology, so that the power of digitalization and intelligence can be fully released into industrial development. Therefore, the "meta-brain ecology" is not only an ecology that promotes the industrialization of AI and industrial AI, but also an ecology that accelerates the integration of digital reality and industrial digitalization. The challenges faced by the integration of digital reality and the challenges we see in ai transformation are similar in many essential issues.

We are in great need of partners who can provide digital reality integration and AI innovation capabilities, which we call left-handed partners, and they can provide digital, AI-based innovation capabilities. At the same time, we need to have a very strong sales channel that can connect the industry and end customers, software vendors, etc., and work with left-hand partners to build leading digital real integration and AI solutions, and provide the ability to land in the industrial AI of the real economy, so as to truly empower industrial customers, which is our right-hand partner. Inspur Information still plays a very important platform role, enabling our left and right-hand partners to achieve collaborative innovation on Inspur's product platform, namely computing platform, resource platform, and algorithm platform, and accelerate the pace of industrial innovation and transformation. This is our further understanding of the fusion of metabrain ecology and digital reality.

Digital-real fusion is required AI big model, but AI big model should not become a "unique dark tool"

For Inspur Information, the essence of the business is to give full play to the strong capabilities in data centers and infrastructure, help the industry and customers' business grow rapidly, and accelerate the intelligent transformation of society, which is our goal.

In the process of promoting this goal and implementing the strategy, we will interact with customers very closely, perceive their pain points and needs, and what they need and think in the process of industrial intelligent transformation. Therefore, when we use the AI server as the intelligent computing infrastructure and the intelligent computing center as the computing power infrastructure to cooperate with our customers, we will see that the next step in the construction of the infrastructure is how to make full use of the computing power infrastructure and closely integrate with the scene and industry applications. Here, we see customers experiencing challenges in terms of algorithms.

Under the background of industrial AI and digital-real integration, the current industry practice is to make a model for each scenario, that is, "there are 10,000 models for 10,000 scenarios", which is a very uneconomical and very difficult algorithm supply model. So we are thinking, is there a better way to help the industry, help partners, help customers to gain the ability to innovate AI algorithms?

In fact, Inspur Information has been doing corresponding work in this regard, such as helping customers to extend the optimization of training frameworks, helping customers implement models to accelerate chips, helping customers generate models from data through automatic machine learning, and so on. We hope that through our efforts, we can make the process of industrial AI faster and more efficient.

In 2021, we stand in front of the opportunity of the AI big model. For us, this opportunity is possible to realize the infrastructure of AI algorithms, so as to help our customers in thousands of industries to achieve the versatility and generalization of AI algorithms faster. This is also the very essential reason why we chose to make a big model of AI. Not because of chasing hot spots, but because this is indeed a customer need, is the need of industrial AI transformation. We will do any work that is helpful to the transformation of industrial AI, to the integration of logarithmic reality, and to the development of intelligence.

A good technology cannot become a unique secret weapon of anyone's family, so it cannot be universally inclusive. Inspur information in this regard is very clear, the work we are doing today is to break the original high threshold of the AI big model, make it more universal and inclusive, we hope that through no code or low code, so that even ordinary enterprises and institutions, ordinary citizens or enthusiasts, can develop their own innovative applications based on this big model. I think that's our purpose.

Metacostem servers are the new infrastructure in the era of digital-real fusion

From the previous cloud computing and AI to today's meta-universe, if a technology is to become a basic technology that can empower thousands of industries and social and economic fields, it must be inseparable from the support of infrastructure, and we can clearly see this from the development process of the past industry.

At present, the metaverse is rising rapidly, and more like Meta and Microsoft are talking about personal experience in the United States, but there is a huge industrial opportunity in China is the integration of digital reality. The so-called cognition of the world, the reproduction of the world, to achieve the integration of the digital real world. When the digital economy and the real economy are integrated, the amount of data generated, the amount of algorithms generated, and the demand for massive computing power brought about by it are inevitable.

From the beginning, Inspur Information, as a computing power player involved in this industry, had to think about how to create a suitable infrastructure for the era of meta-universe and the era of digital-real integration. It's not just hardware -- hardware is of course very important, because we need to adapt to different scenarios of computing power, with different computing systems, computing architectures -- and it is very important to build a software infrastructure. This includes software support to connect different tool platforms, and also includes the construction of algorithm infrastructure. Only by combining such software tools, algorithm infrastructure and computing power hardware can we truly release the infinite creative space of the meta-universe, so that the digitization of the physical world and the intelligentization of the digital world can be fully realized under the massive scenario of the integration of digital reality, so as to achieve the goal of accelerating the integration of digital reality and promoting the high-quality development of the digital economy.

Inspur Information does the industrial layout according to the long-term vision, not for the short-term stock market impact. Just as we proposed AI servers a few years ago, and then continued to carry out technological innovation, product development, and industrial advancement, we propose metaversymic servers today, which is also based on similar long-term thinking.

First, as a computing infrastructure manufacturer, We clearly know that if we want to promote the development of the meta-universe industry and enable the meta-universe to serve the integration of digital reality and the development of the digital economy, then we must plan, develop, build and operate the infrastructure work well, which is the duty of Inspur Information as a computing infrastructure manufacturer. Today's proposed meta-universe server products is to prepare for the digital and intelligent transformation of this era.

Second, we hope that by defining a new product category such as metaverse server, the entire industry, customers, and partners can clearly know that we are ready to enter the metaverse era from the infrastructure level. It is no longer a concept in games, consumers, and science fiction, it is an important product technical support to promote the integration of digital reality and the development of the real economy. This is a very important point why Inspur Information defines metaversary servers. We hope to use such a product to let the industry, the application community, and all customers clearly know that if we want to do a good job in the metacosm, to do a good job in the integration of numbers and realities, we need to have a powerful metacosmity server.