Text/Huang Haifeng's correspondence life
Recently, the world's first AI long movie "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" was released. The 90-minute film was actually produced by 50 AI artists in just three months with the help of a series of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Runway.
This means that human content production has ushered in the singularity moment of the Big Bang. According to Huawei's official forecast, by 2026, AI will generate more than 250 billion high-quality images and more than 70 million short videos. The production mode of AIGC's intelligent content will accelerate the society's progress towards the era of full intelligence.
How should ICT vendors, ISPs/ICPs, distributors, application developers, and other industry parties seize the opportunity of the cooperation invitation letter issued in the AI era?
Recently, the author found the answer at the Huawei China Partner Conference 2024. In his keynote speech, Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board of Directors and President of ICT Products & Solutions of Huawei, pointed out that the acceleration of the transition to intelligence in thousands of industries will drive the overall investment in IT & CT, and the total investment in ICT is expected to reach 4.9 trillion yuan in 2027.
In the complex process of making various industries intelligent, how does Huawei work with partners to seize the opportunities, and how does it divide labor?
In the era of intelligence, there are two major opportunities
At present, artificial intelligence is moving from training to inference, bringing huge opportunities to the industry chain. Yang Chaobin predicts that the market space of AI training and pushing all-in-one machines in China will be 16.8 billion yuan in 2024. At the same time, as more intelligent application scenarios are born, the campus is accelerating towards 10 Gigabit intelligence, which also brings new business opportunities.
Faced with opportunities in the field of smart campuses and AI inference, Yang Chaobin said that smart campuses are designed based on customer business needs and based on the architecture of "network + platform + service", realizing the evolution from vertical to horizontal architecture.
Yang Chaobin emphasized that Huawei will focus on its own product technology and deepen its roots, and at the same time develop the roots, gather partners, and achieve synergy and growth with partners, so as to achieve great opportunities in the intelligent era.
On the one hand, Huawei will work with partners such as system integration and solution development to seize the opportunity of upgrading the 10 Gigabit smart campus, and on the other hand, Huawei will build a solid computing power foundation for the industry with the help of native application ecosystems such as Kunpeng and Ascend.
Speaking of which, you may want to ask, specifically for China's government and enterprise market in 2024, what intelligent "pioneers" will Huawei bring to lead innovation, and how will it work with partners to achieve a win-win future?
We will work with four major partners to help upgrade the 10 Gigabit Smart Park
Traditional campus construction usually uses multiple subsystems that operate independently, and because the data between the systems cannot be transmitted in time, it often leads to serious information islands and low resource utilization. In response to this dilemma, smart parks usually adopt a reference architecture of "platform + service + network", covering applications, connections, terminals, and digital platforms.
In 2024, what major actions will Huawei take to make campuses more intelligent in all scenarios, and how will it empower partners?
On the one hand, Huawei mainly focuses on connectivity and digital platforms, and Huawei needs ISV partners to develop applications on the platform, terminal partners to provide multiple types of terminals that meet requirements, and partners to do a series of work such as consulting and planning for specific projects to serve end customers well.
On the other hand, in order to adapt to 10 Gigabit smart campus scenarios, Huawei has created a full range of product portfolio solutions. First, Huawei will provide 40 all-scenario Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 APs this year, matching 33 high-quality 10 Gigabit switches, providing ubiquitous 10 Gigabit bandwidth access. Second, for multi-branch scenarios such as large enterprises and finance, Huawei will provide 35 hyper-converged routers and 21 SASE security gateways to meet the fast and secure access requirements of enterprises and branches.
Specifically, Huawei will combine the campus digital platform and various typical scenarios of 10 Gigabit smart campuses to provide a series of products such as storage, intelligent collaboration, and intelligent sensing.
Action 1: Work with system integration partners to create a high-quality office experience
In 2024, with the arrival of Wi-Fi 7, campuses will accelerate their transition to full wirelessness, the number of wireless terminals in campuses will grow rapidly, and video conferencing will become the norm. It is understood that the number of AP connections per AP of the new generation of Wi-Fi 7 is twice that of Wi-Fi 6.
It is reported that Huawei will provide a series of network construction guides, model selection tools, compatibility lists, and open APIs to enable system integration partners to integrate solutions more efficiently. In the O&M phase, Huawei provides a fully converged unified platform for planning, construction, maintenance, and optimization, enabling minute-level planning, one-click service provisioning, reduced number of network maintenance, and one-click optimization in seconds, enabling partners to deliver more efficiently.
Action 2: Work with solution development partners to accelerate the digital and intelligent upgrade of the industry
With the acceleration of the digital and intelligent upgrade of thousands of industries, the industry needs competitive solutions. Based on the above requirements, Huawei will provide an open architecture for IoT campus network scenarios, with built-in Bluetooth, Starlight, RFID, and other IoT technologies in Wi-Fi, and will support container solutions.
When developing IoT applications, partners can easily load Huawei-based devices without waiting for Huawei's device version, shortening the integration time from 3-6 months to 1 week, helping partners quickly build IoT converged networks.
In addition, this year, Huawei plans to provide a simulation environment for real services in seven major industries through the establishment of joint innovation labs and other mechanisms, and invest experts and partners to design, develop, and verify solutions, so that more partners can participate in building competitive innovation solutions.
Action 3: Empower business partners to shift from selling equipment to selling services
With the construction of smart campuses in full swing, how to ensure smart teaching, efficient O&M, and secure operations? Huawei will help partners complete the transformation from selling equipment to selling services, and help them provide more advanced network management and network security services for industry customers. At the same time, the industry represented by education and supermarkets has a huge space for network management services, and the revenue of partners in management services is expected to be more than three times that of equipment revenue.
Action 4: Enable business distribution partners to jointly expand the distribution market of 10 billion yuan
In the distribution area, Huawei released a full range of Huawei Kunling products last year, and this year will further improve its distribution product portfolio, including device sensing and collaboration platforms on the device side, WiFi, switches, and firewalls on the connection side, to help partners win more market opportunities.
At the same time, Huawei will provide Kunling with a one-stop digital platform to provide end-to-end digital support from customer development, project installation and commissioning, after-sales operation and maintenance, so that partners can buy, sell, learn, use, install, and maintain, and expand more space in the distribution market.
It is worth mentioning that for room-like scenarios such as classrooms, dormitories, and hotels, Huawei has created an IP+POL campus solution, which reduces network energy consumption by 30% and total network cost of ownership by 30% through a full range of Huawei optical products. In addition, Huawei provides partners with a three-piece POL set, including a planning tool, analyzer, and simulator to help partners plan and deliver more easily.
Kunpeng and Ascend have joined forces to build a computing power foundation for the industry
After the 100-model war in 2023, large models are accelerating into the stage of application innovation, and have now penetrated into finance, education, transportation and other fields. According to Goldman Sachs, global AI investment will reach $114 billion in 2023 and $250 billion in 2028, doubling directly.
Large models are inseparable from large computing power. Based on the above background, the focus of the Huawei China Partner Conference has extended from the industry application of the underlying system last year to the computing power field this year.
Specifically, at the hardware level, Kunpeng has been widely used in core scenarios in industries such as finance and government, and Ascend has become the first choice for AI innovation in China. At the software level, openEuler has the largest market share. At the same time, the Ascend AI framework will have the largest market share growth rate in 2023 and will become the preferred AI framework in China in 2024.
Specifically, Huawei will provide the Euler operating system, the Kunpeng DevKit, the Bisheng compiler, and the Kunpeng BoostKit application enablement kit, which can be integrated into developers' existing development pipelines as components on demand, enabling them to implement a set of code, a set of pipelines, and build multiple platform versions.
At the Ascend level, Huawei provides the heterogeneous computing architecture CANN, as well as the AI framework Ascend and the Large Model Development Kit to implement two native development modes and achieve an open architecture, allowing partners to develop optimal operators and models based on Ascend.
In the next two years, Huawei plans to develop more than 1,000 Kunpeng and Ascend native application partners, covering 80% of domestic computing scenarios, and working with partners to build a native computing industry ecosystem.
In order to embrace the era of artificial intelligence, how will Huawei make moves in terms of computing power? According to Yang Chaobin's introduction, Huawei will work with partners to build an open and leading AI basic software and hardware platform, and work with partners to build a solid computing power foundation in three aspects.
First, at the hardware level, Huawei and its partners will build a variety of hardware forms based on Ascend, including modules, boards, servers, training and pushing all-in-one machines, pods, and clusters, covering all scenarios of "cloud, edge, and device". In terms of application enablement, Huawei will further open up the optimal model library, deep learning components, intelligent edge components, and industry SDKs to help partners and customers efficiently develop and debug models and applications.
From model to application, it is the last mile of AI landing, and it is also the key link of AI landing in the industry. To this end, Huawei has launched the Ascend Inference Solution, which enables rapid development and efficient deployment of inference applications throughout the entire process of hardware selection, training and pushing, inference execution, and application service launch.
First, at the hardware level, Huawei provides a full range of Ascend inference hardware to meet the computing power requirements of different scenarios. In addition, Huawei will further open up its hardware, launch the Kunpeng Partner Network (KPN) program, and further upgrade the APN Partner Network (APN) partner program, which will grow to more than 50 KPN and APN partners this year.
In the development phase, Huawei will use the Ascend inference engine MindIE to improve work efficiency by 80% in isomorphic scenarios and achieve a 10x model compression ratio through exception control algorithms. In addition, in the inference execution phase, Huawei supports technologies such as Flash Attention and LookAhead, increasing service capacity by 10 times.
Finally, Huawei will provide Ascend's native service-based capabilities for a large number of users, enabling inference applications to be rolled out in hours. For example, for industry large-scale model training and inference scenarios, Huawei will launch the FusionCube A3000 hyper-converged all-in-one machine to provide large-scale model partners with a one-stop deployment experience.
The author's observation: work together with partners to win the future
Imagination determines how far humans can go, and execution determines how fast we can go.
In order to welcome the arrival of the intelligent world, Yang Chaobin gave Huawei's coping strategies from two aspects: intelligent campus and computing power base. We believe that these initiatives will help our partners provide more valuable services, and we will share the vast business opportunities driven by AI with our partners."
It is worth noting that Huawei's plan to build a digital intelligence infrastructure for the industry is not a single point of empowerment, but a powerful "industry intelligent twin" hidden behind it.
After more than 30 years of experience in the ICT field, Huawei has accumulated deep experience in intelligent sensing, intelligent connectivity, intelligent foundations, intelligent platforms, and AI large models, forming a comprehensive and three-dimensional intelligent solution matrix.
Ride the wind and break the waves, and set sail at the right time. Looking ahead, I hope that Huawei will continue to empower its partners, join hands with the industry ecosystem to ride the AI wave, and jointly draw a new blueprint for the intelligent era.