Huawei threw out the "eight cutting-edge technology challenges" five times the salary and then recruited talented teenagers

On April 26, Zhou Hong, president of Huawei's Institute for Strategic Studies, proposed eight cutting-edge technology challenges at the 2022 Huawei Global Analyst Conference.

"Facing the future, we must dare to seek answers from front-end basic research." Zhou Hong said that in basic scientific research, in addition to supporting the "Boer Quadrant" innovation driven by the interest of scientists, Huawei hopes to explore the "Pasteur Quadrant" innovation with partners, which can not only expand scientific understanding, but also create application value.

On the same day, Huawei's rotating chairman Hu Houkun also responded to the challenges faced by Huawei at present, when talking about innovation, he said that Huawei's innovation stems from talents, and Huawei once again issued a recruitment order for "talented teenagers" to the world, no limit on academic qualifications, no limit on schools, and five times the salary. "Many friends ask me what is the base of five times the salary? In fact, there is no cardinality to represent a larger imagination space. ”

Seek "quality" survival

In 1987, Ren Zhengfei, who turned 43, led a team to establish Huawei, using two multimeters and an oscilloscope to start a business in a "rotten shed" in Shenzhen. At present, Huawei has grown from a small and unknown company to a global leader in the field of communications.

However, since entering the "U.S. Entity List", the "global supply chain system" that Huawei relies on has been frequently challenged, and the limitation of core technologies such as chips has also allowed the company to start a long period of self-help. In the past three years, how has Huawei's main business developed? Under the limitations of technology, how Huawei should move forward has become a topic of concern for analysts this time.

"In the past, Huawei's difficulties have not decreased, and there are many problems caused by environmental changes this year, but Huawei still seeks to survive with quality." In his speech on the first day of the analyst conference, Hu Houkun mentioned that the current challenges are mainly in the global epidemic, rising commodity prices, and exchange rate fluctuations.

For how to "high-quality development", Hu Houkun mentioned three directions in an interview with the media: "The first is to ensure the competitiveness of product solutions, the continuity of services can not be problematic, the current customer satisfaction management has invested more resources, hoping to find difficulties at any time and solve problems; the second aspect, quality should be reflected in steady operation, can not survive everything is empty, for low-quality trade fairs to give up, Huawei's current business structure is more diversified, each business must be focused, to achieve quality development, If quality development cannot be achieved, it will face closure; the third consideration is to face the future, increase continuous investment, and provide funds to optimize the innovation path. ”

At the same time, Hu Houkun also bluntly said that the current innovation environment of Huawei has also encountered difficulties, "advanced devices and processes can not be obtained, it is difficult to lead through single-point technology, the path of technological innovation should be adjusted, and now more attention is to find breakthroughs in system innovation, including technical theory, software architecture and other breakthroughs." ”

"There are dangers and opportunities in crises." Hu Houkun said that last year, Huawei's new strategy for terminal business was effective, on the one hand, the "1+8" strategy, watches, bracelets, tablets, smart screens and other shipments have a good growth, on the other hand, the use of software plus hardware practices, the construction of Hongmeng system equipment has been 220 million, which makes Huawei full of confidence in the future development.

In other businesses, Hu Houkun said that this year's cloud service put forward the concept of everything is serviced, infrastructure as a service, experience as a service, from the direction of the right. In addition, Huawei's automotive business will definitely have new smart car products released this year, whether it is a model of smart selection mode or An Inside mode.

When faced with the question of whether to build a chip factory by itself, Wang Tao, managing director of Huawei and director of the ICT Infrastructure Business Management Committee, denied it.

"Chip manufacturing involves a long chain, and no one company, including Huawei, can solve this problem on its own. To truly solve the problem, the global industrial chain needs to work together, the industrial chain decoupling, splitting is not conducive to global development, will cause slow technological progress, cost increase, these costs will eventually be passed on to consumers. Wang Tao said that whether in China or overseas, semiconductor manufacturing capabilities are improving, and it is expected that chip shortages may be solved within a few years, and Huawei looks forward to seeing such results. With the development of the industrial chain, Huawei's problems will be solved.

Eight cutting-edge technology challenges for the future

Talking about Huawei's innovation, Hu Houkun said that in recent years, although Huawei has faced operational difficulties, its investment in research and development has not decreased but has increased, from 10% of revenue in the past year to 22% last year.

On the 25th, Huawei once again issued a call order for talented teenagers to the world. Hu Houkun said that in Huawei's recruitment information, it offers a salary of more than 5 times the average income of the industry, hoping to recruit talents in the fields of digital, computer, physics, materials, chips, intelligent manufacturing, and chemistry. "5x pay is an imaginative thing".

Huawei's "Genius Youth" project was officially announced in June 2019. At that time, Ren Zhengfei mentioned in his speech within Huawei's EMT (management team), "This year (2019) we will recruit 20-30 talented teenagers from all over the world, and next year we will also recruit 200-300 talents from all over the world." These gifted teenagers are like 'loaches', drilling into our organization and activating our ranks. ”

In addition to talented teenagers, Huawei has also invested in the cultivation of talents such as scientists for many years.

According to publicly available data, Huawei has at least 700 mathematicians, more than 800 physicists, more than 120 chemists, 15,000 people engaged in basic research, and more than 60,000 product developers. At the same time, Huawei has also cooperated with more than 300 universities and more than 900 research institutions and companies around the world, implemented 7,840 projects, invested 1.8 billion US dollars, and signed more than 1,000 R&D cooperation contracts with foreign payments.

These basic talents support Huawei's exploration of future technologies.

Zhou Hong said that driven by various needs, global digitalization is growing at an exponential rate. Facing the future, Huawei has proposed eight cutting-edge technologies for the future.

These technologies include how to develop new perception and control capabilities on the human-machine interface; how to continuously and non-perceptually measure people's blood pressure, blood glucose and ECG in health, whether new chemical drugs, biological drugs and vaccines can be helped invent through AI strong artificial intelligence; how to develop application-centric, value-oriented and experience-oriented high-efficiency automation and intelligent software in software; how to approach and extend Shannon limits in communication to achieve efficient and high-performance connections at the regional and global levels How to develop adaptive and efficient computing models in computing, develop non-von Neumann computing architectures and non-traditional components, develop interpretable and debuggable AI; how to help invent new molecules, catalysts and devices through AI in materials; how to develop technologies beyond traditional CMOS manufacturing in manufacturing to achieve lower cost and higher efficiency; whether safe and efficient energy conversion and energy storage can be developed in energy to provide on-demand services.

"All of our current imaginations of the future are probably conservative, so we need to be braver. I hope to work with academia and industry to reconstruct basic theories, reconstruct architectures, and reconstruct software to explore and create the future together. Zhou Hong said.