Text/Huang Haifeng's communication life
On July 6, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference with the theme of "Intelligent Connected World, Generating the Future" was successfully held. This year's conference focuses on three major topic sections: technology, industry and humanities, focusing on ten cutting-edge trends: large models, smart chips, scientific intelligence, robots, brain-like intelligence, metaverse, autonomous driving, big data, rule of law and security, and blockchain.
At the Ascend AI Industry Summit 2023, Zhang Dixuan, President of Huawei's Ascend Computing Business, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Building an Intelligent Foundation and Leading the New Future of AI".
According to Zhang Dixuan, through the efforts of the past year, the Yiteng AI industry has developed rapidly and the ecology has flourished. Specifically, there are more than 30 hardware partners and 1,200 software partners certified by Yiteng AI, more than 2,500 joint program incubators, more than 1.8 million Ascend developers, and more than 100,000 AI talents in cooperation with more than 300 colleges and universities.
Three major initiatives to accelerate the move towards general artificial intelligence
Since 2018, Huawei has released its AI strategy, focusing on AI basic software and hardware, hierarchical opening, and making good progress in the Internet, finance, and carrier fields, jointly promoting intelligent upgrading of the industry. For example, the framework adaptation capability of Yiteng AI supports industry frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, reducing the adaptation time of the evolved version from 3 months to 1 month.
What everyone is concerned about is how Ascend AI will bring the above achievements to different scenarios in thousands of industries based on technological innovation in the future, and promote the intelligent upgrading of the industry. In response to this question, Zhang Dixuan emphasized that Ascend AI will accelerate the direction of general artificial intelligence from leading computing power innovation, breaking through software architecture, enabling industry upgrades.
Leading computing power innovation: from single point computing power to cluster computing power, from node innovation to system innovation. With the rapid development of AI, higher requirements are put forward for the cluster size, training speed, and cluster stability of computing power. To this end, Ascend AI launched the industry's first Vancard AI cluster, which lays a solid foundation for computing power development through the three advantages of overall system design, bus architecture design and multi-level reliable design.
It is worth mentioning that Ascend has deployed thousands of Ascend AI clusters to support the construction of artificial intelligence computing centers in 25 cities. Among them, many artificial intelligence computing centers such as Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center and Xi'an Future Artificial Intelligence Computing Center were also selected as the first batch of "National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Public Computing Power Open Innovation Platform".
Breakthrough in software architecture: do thick innovation, and enable large model innovation in the whole process. In terms of software innovation, Ascend AI innovates in all aspects from the whole process of large model development, training, fine-tuning, compression, and inference.
In addition, Ascend is compatible with the industry's tripartite ecosystem, supporting the migration and development of three-party operators, compatibility with three-party communities and acceleration libraries, and efficient migration of three-party large models, reducing the migration and debugging tuning time of current operators to 2 people/week, and reducing the lossless migration cycle of large models from months to weeks.
Enable industry upgrading: Jointly build an integrated solution for training and promotion of large industry models and penetrate into core industry scenarios. For large-model solutions, Ascend AI reshapes the development process from the aspects of technology pre-research, product development, and solution integration, and launches an integrated solution for industry large-model training and promotion, enabling all business scenarios and processes with a fully open architecture.
In addition to empowering thousands of industries, Ascend AI also enables scientific intelligence innovation and integrates AI into more scientific research fields. For example, in the field of molecular simulation, the clinical research cycle of Al-enabled target discovery and compound generation drugs ranges from grade to month level; In the field of fluid simulation, the efficiency of multi-scale spatiotemporal prediction has been increased by 10 times, and the duration of aerodynamic simulation has been shortened to 1/1000.
Empower partners, cultivate talents, and build a complete ecosystem
Technological innovation is only the cornerstone, and the development of the AI industry is inseparable from the help of partners and talents. Based on this, Zhang Dixuan proposed to develop a business ecosystem based on enabling partners, and build a technology ecology with talent training as the core.
In terms of enabling partners, Ascend AI will further open up hardware, such as partner industrial computers, partner robots, etc., to enable partners to jointly build a computing power base. At the same time, it will also develop the Ascend Partner Network to expand the space to achieve win-win business.
In terms of talent training, Ascend AI has joined forces with more than 300 institutions, empowered more than 3,000 classrooms, and trained 160,000 students, and will unite thousands of universities to train millions of teachers and students in the next three years. In addition, the Ascend Scientific Research and Innovation Enabling Program will be implemented, and 10,000-level financial support will be provided from academic funds and resource support.
"Huawei Ascend will firmly invest in the field of artificial intelligence, lay a good foundation for computing power in technical software and hardware, and work with partners and customers to create a new era of artificial intelligence and accelerate the development of general AI intelligence." Zhang Dixuan appealed at the end of his speech.