Artificial intelligence "goes deep to reality" to reshape thousands of industries

Predict typhoons, develop new drugs, identify failures, develop production plans... When people's cognition of artificial intelligence (AI) models is still stuck in dialogue, writing poetry, and painting, China's artificial intelligence models have become a new engine for the development of the real economy.

On July 7, at the Huawei Developer Conference 2023, HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu Model 3.0 was officially released, and its capabilities in coal mining, railway, meteorology, finance, and other fields are amazing. At the same time, during the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Huawei launched a series of "big moves" in the field of artificial intelligence, such as launching large-model joint innovation, releasing an integrated solution for large-model training and promotion, and launching the first Vancard AI cluster, which attracted great attention from the industry. Industry insiders believe that the direction of efforts of science and technology leaders shows that the Chinese industry is "going deeper and towards reality" and will reshape thousands of industries.

Do practical things AI big model landing in the real industry

In the coal mining industry, the Pangu Mine Big Model has been used in 8 mines across the country, and a large model can cover more than 1,000 subdivision scenarios under the business processes of mining, mining, machinery, transportation, communication, washing and other business processes of coal mines, so that more coal miners can work on the ground, which not only makes the working environment of coal miners more comfortable, but also greatly reduces safety accidents.

In the railway industry, the Pangu Railway model can accurately identify 67 kinds of freight cars and more than 430 kinds of faults in the current network, and the screening rate of trouble-free pictures is as high as 95%, becoming a powerful digital assistant around freight inspectors, liberating inspectors from the daily inspection of millions of "picture seas".

In the financial industry, Pangu Financial Model can automatically generate process and operation guidance for counter staff according to customer problems, reducing the original average of 5 operations to 1, and shortening the closing time by more than 5 minutes.

In the manufacturing industry, in the past, it often took more than 3 hours to make a one-day production plan for a single production line, while Pangu manufacturing large models can make a production plan for the next 3 days in 1 minute.

In the field of drug discovery, it turns out that the development of a new drug takes an average of 10 years and costs $1 billion. The Pangu drug molecular model helped the team of Professor Liu Bing of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University discover the world's first new target and new class of antibiotics in 40 years, shorten the lead drug development cycle to 1 month, and reduce the R&D cost by 70%.

In the field of meteorology, Pangu Meteorological Big Model is the first AI prediction model with more accuracy than traditional numerical prediction methods, originally predicting the path of a typhoon in the next 10 days, requiring 5 hours of simulation on a high-performance computer cluster of 3,000 servers, now Pangea Meteorology Large Model through AI reasoning, researchers only need a single server single card configuration, within 10 seconds can obtain more accurate prediction results.

On July 6, the international academic journal Nature published the research results of the R&D team of HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu Model, "3D Neural Networks for Accurate Medium-term Global Weather Forecasting". The reviewer of Nature spoke highly of the results: "HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu Weather Model allows people to re-examine the future of weather forecasting models, and the opening of models will promote the development of this field. ”

"The Pangu model should allow every industry, every enterprise, and everyone to have their own expert assistants, making the work more efficient and easier." Zhang Pingan, Executive Director of Huawei and CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, said when releasing Pangu Model 3.0, "We have always adhered to the strategy of AI for Industries and continued to move forward on the road of deepening the industry. I firmly believe that the big model will reshape every industry. ”

"In addition to the application of dialogue, writing poetry, painting, etc., it is necessary to effectively invest the big model in urban development, financial technology, biomedicine, industrial manufacturing, scientific research and other fields, and land in the real industry to bring real value to the social economy." Wu Hequan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said.

According to the "Chinese Intelligent Large Model Map Research Report" released by the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Research Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China at the end of May, 79 large models with more than 1 billion parameters in China have been released. In addition to Huawei, leading companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, iFLYTEK, Meituan, Baichuan Intelligence, Yunzhisheng, and Tencent have successively deployed in this field.

Up to now, the artificial intelligence model developed in China has shown great application potential in the fields of smart mining, drug research and development, meteorology, government affairs, finance, intelligent manufacturing, and railway management. Industry experts believe that at present, the use of large models to accelerate the digital and intelligent transformation of thousands of industries and deepen the real economy has become the consensus of China's industrial circles.

"In the next step, the artificial intelligence big model should strengthen the further integration of manufacturing technology, industry and application, and develop the large model for manufacturing in depth, so as to provide solid support for the digital transformation and intelligent upgrading of China's manufacturing industry." Li Bohu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an expert in system simulation and manufacturing informatization, said.

Deeply rooted and tamped the foundation of large computing power of root technology

On July 6, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference that the scale of the core industry of artificial intelligence in mainland China has reached 500 billion yuan, the number of enterprises has exceeded 4,300, the scale of computing power ranks second in the world, and more than 2,500 digital workshops and smart factories have been built, and after intelligent transformation, the R&D cycle has been shortened by about 20.7%, production efficiency has been increased by about 34.8%, the defective product rate has been reduced by about 27.4%, and carbon emissions have been reduced by about 21.2%.

The "head geese effect" of artificial intelligence empowering thousands of industries is accelerating, and various root technological innovations are the foundation. According to Zhang Pingan, Huawei has built an AI computing power cloud platform based on Kunpeng and Ascend at the lowest level, as well as a heterogeneous computing architecture CANN, an all-scenario AI framework MindSpore, and an AI development production line ModelArts, providing key capabilities such as distributed parallel acceleration, operator and compilation optimization, and cluster-level communication optimization for the development and operation of AI large models. Based on Huawei's AI root technology, the training performance of AI large models can be tuned to 1.1 times that of mainstream GPUs in the industry.

Deep application has created a huge demand for computing power, which is also the basis for training artificial intelligence large models. At Huawei Developer Conference 2023, Zhang Pingan announced that the Ascend AI cloud service with single-cluster 2000P Flops computing power will be launched simultaneously in HUAWEI CLOUD's Ulanqab and Gui'an AI Computing Power Center. In addition to supporting MindSpore, Huawei's all-scenario AI framework, Ascend AI Cloud Service also supports mainstream AI frameworks such as Pytorch and Tensorflow. At the same time, 90% of the operators in these frameworks can be smoothly migrated to the Ascend platform through Huawei's end-to-end migration tools. In addition, GPU failures are often encountered during the training process of large models, and developers have to restart training frequently, which takes a long time and is costly. Ascend AI cloud services can provide longer and stable AI computing power services, with a 30-day long-term stability rate of 90% for kcal training, and a breakpoint recovery time of no more than 10 minutes.

According to reports, Huawei leveraged the comprehensive advantages of cloud, computing, storage, network, and energy on the basis of each single point of innovation, carried out architecture innovation, and launched the Ascend AI cluster. At present, the Ascend AI cluster has supported the construction of artificial intelligence computing centers in 25 cities across the country, of which 7 urban public computing power platforms have been selected as the first batch of national "new generation artificial intelligence public computing power open innovation platforms". During the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Huawei announced a comprehensive upgrade of the Ascend AI cluster, expanding the cluster size from the initial 4,000-card cluster to 16,000-card cluster, becoming the industry's first 10,000-card AI cluster. What does an AI cluster of 16,000 cards mean? "According to our assessment, a large model with 175 billion parameters and 100B data can be completed in only half a day." Zhang Dixuan, President of Huawei's Ascend Computing Business, revealed.

Great opening up to build a win-win industrial ecology

"In the past year, with the joint efforts of all partners, the Ascend AI industry has made considerable progress: the number of developers has doubled to more than 1.8 million; Based on Ascend AI, more than 30 large models have been natively incubated and adapted, and so far, about half of China's large model innovations have been supported by Ascend AI; We have developed more than 30 hardware partners, more than 1,200 ISVs (independent software developers), and jointly launched more than 2,500 industry AI solutions, enabling us to serve carriers, Internet, finance and other industry scenarios on a large scale. Ken Hu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Ascend AI's thriving industry ecosystem stems from Huawei's open innovation. Huawei continues to open AI modules and accelerator cards, provide rich interface development documents, reference designs, and software and hardware technical support, helping partners launch a variety of hardware products and stimulate innovation. At the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, 23 companies launched the Ascend AI series of new products, covering inference servers, training servers, edge computing intelligent gateways, industrial computers, developer kits, robots, drones, etc. In addition, Huawei has launched the newly launched "Ascend Partner Network" (APN) partner program, which encourages partners to build their own branded products or solutions based on Ascend AI through sales support provided by the main distributor, technical support between Huawei and the main seller, and a variety of business incentives.

In the field of AI large models, Huawei and four partners, including iFLYTEK, jointly released the integrated solution for large-model training and promotion, combining the advantages of Ascend AI's basic software and hardware capabilities, partners' large models, and integrated training and promotion platforms, to provide industry users with "out-of-the-box" large-model integrated solutions through joint design, joint development, collaborative listing, and continuous iteration, reshaping the large-model development process, and solving the needs of large-model implementation in various industries. Let the big model fully realize the value in the industry.

In addition, under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the China Electronics Industry Standardization Technology Association, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the Fifth Research Institute of Electronics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Huawei and other units jointly established the "Large Model Industry Working Group" to jointly promote the application of China's large model and industrial incubation.

According to Zhang Pingan, the number of HUAWEI CLOUD developers worldwide has exceeded 4.6 million, and more than 10,000 products have been listed in cloud stores. HUAWEI CLOUD provides an easy-to-use and reliable large model tool suite, Kaitian aPaaS that gathers APIs for multiple industry scenarios, and an exclusive large model community with rich high-quality courses and technical certifications. In addition, HUAWEI CLOUD has joined hands with the China Public Relations Association, the Cultural Big Data Industry Committee, and several partners to establish a large-model high-quality data alliance. The Alliance will bring together open data from all member units to create high-quality datasets covering thousands of industries and promote the vigorous development of industry large models.

"The key to the development of artificial intelligence is to be down-to-earth, promote artificial intelligence to go deeper and practical, and empower industrial upgrading." Ken Hu said, "Facing the future, Huawei has two focus points in the development of artificial intelligence: First, build a strong computing power foundation to support the development of the Chinese industry intelligence. Second, truly let artificial intelligence serve thousands of industries and serve scientific research and innovation. (Reporter Wu Wei)

Source: Economic Information Daily