The terminal winner hand is in AI
Text: "Chinese Entrepreneur" reporter Yan Junwen
Editor|Li Wei
Header photo by Yan Junwen
After the Mate 60 series, Huawei has another phone that has become a bestseller.
On April 18th, Huawei upgraded the P series mobile phones to the Pura brand, and launched the "Pioneer Plan", launching Pura 70 Ultra and Pura 70 Pro, two mobile phones, priced from 9999 yuan and 7999 yuan respectively, and the other two Pura 70 and Pura 70 Pro+ were also launched on April 22, and several products were sold out within minutes of being put on the shelves.
Market research firm TechInsights predicts that the Pura 70 series will ship more than 10 million units in 2024, thanks to the time window and the ability to guarantee the production capacity of the supply chain. Huawei's last explosive product, the Mate 60 series, sold more than 6 million units.
China Entrepreneur visited two Huawei offline stores in Beijing and Shanghai, and the stock situation is: the Pura 70 and Pura 70 Pro+ with 512GB and 1TB of RAM are in stock, and the Pura 70 Ultra with 1TB of memory is in stock.
At Huawei's flagship store on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, people are vying to experience Huawei's Pura 70 series mobile phones first. Photo: Yan Junwen
The sales staff of this Huawei offline store in Beijing took the initiative to recommend that Apple mobile phones can also participate in Huawei's "trade-in" activity, but the price range is not as good as that of Apple stores. According to the depreciation policy of Apple stores, the 128GB iPhone 14 Pro can be depreciated by up to 4,100 yuan.
Since 2012, Huawei's P series mobile phones have begun to sell out of the circle with photography functions, and the Pura 70 series on sale this time focuses on "ultra-high-speed wind speed flash shooting", which is amazing for objects moving at a speed of no more than 300 kilometers per hour. Yu Chengdong said: "The development history of Huawei's P series is the history of the development of mobile imaging. ”
At a time when Huawei is soaring, its rival Apple is facing declining sales in China and poor progress in its large-scale model capabilities.
Apple's financial report showed that in the fourth quarter of 2023, which ended December 31, 2023, global sales of iPhones increased by 6%, but its sales in China fell by 13% year-on-year.
Perhaps in order to boost confidence, after two years, Apple announced that it will hold a summer new product launch conference on May 7, mainly to release new iPad products. There is news that this launch will introduce improved versions of the iPad Pro and iPad Air. Apple held a summer conference in 2022 and announced the MacBook Air with a new chip and the updated iPadOS 16 system.
However, the focus of the consumer electronics battlefield has shifted, and now AI is the protagonist, and Cook must come up with the real thing if he wants to impress consumers.
The winner and loser hand is in AI
AI is just a technology, and it's the product that really generates value, and as Steve Jobs said, "People don't know what they want until they show it." ”
The 70-day-a-day special will be the first of its kind in the world. 摄影：闫俊文
Huawei's Pura 70 series is equipped with powerful AI functions, including AI retoucher, Ark scheduling engine, AI air manipulation, and system-level full-link fraud prevention. The Ark scheduling engine is designed to solve the problem of mobile phone stuck, similar to the multi-task switching function of Apple mobile phones, to better manage the background.
Huawei has been in the AI field for a long time. In October 2020, Huawei launched the Mate 40 series with the "AI Wonderful Moments" function, which allows users to remove passers-by from dynamic photos with AI Wonderful Moments.
In August 2023, Huawei officially released the HarmonyOS 4 operating system, which installs large models into mobile phones and calls Huawei's voice system "Xiaoyi" to realize functions such as finding restaurants, navigation, and text organization, with the ultimate goal of building "Xiaoyi" into a super intelligent body.
In addition to the Pura 70 series phones released in the first half of the year, Huawei will also release the Mate 70 series phones in the second half of the year, which will be more powerful. Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, revealed that it will build a "pure-blooded" Hongmeng system, so that Huawei will truly become the third pole of the mobile phone operating system.
Huawei's goal is to fully migrate 5,000 applications that are used on smartphones for more than 99% of the time in the Chinese market in 2024 to the HarmonyOS native operating system, realizing the unification of the operating system and application ecosystem.
However, it is difficult for large models of major companies and startups to be migrated directly to the HarmonyOS system. According to "Chinese Entrepreneur", the HarmonyOS system is based on Huawei's own hardware training, which is different from other companies' training based on NVIDIA CUDA and foreign open source large models, and it is very difficult for the two to be compatible, and it is difficult for other large models to run on HarmonyOS.
Therefore, Huawei chose to develop its own large-scale model, and the pace of products launched is also very fast.
In 2020, Huawei launched the development of the Pangu model, which was officially released in April 2021. In July 2023, Huawei released the Pangu Model 3.0, including four versions of 10 billion parameters, 38 billion parameters, 71 billion parameters and 100 billion parameters, and more than 3 trillion tokens were used in pre-training.
Huawei's 10 billion parameter model is basically on the same order of magnitude as the large model parameters launched by other device manufacturers. For example, in January this year, Honor released the 7 billion parameter level of the device-side platform-level AI large model "magic" large model, and in November 2023, vivo released a large model matrix containing different parameter scales, including 175 billion, 130 billion, 70 billion, 7 billion and 1 billion parameters, and it announced that the 13 billion parameter blue heart large model has been run through the end and open sourced the 7B large model.
Looking at the PC side, Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer, launched the industry's first AI PC on April 18, Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said in an interview with "Chinese Entrepreneur" and other media that Lenovo's model size on the end side is about 7B (7 billion) parameters, which is determined by NPU/CPU and other heterogeneous computing power.
At present, Lenovo's AI PC series products have about 10 tops (that is, trillions of operations per second) NPU (network processor) deployed locally, plus the computing power of CPU and GPU can provide users with choice. Yang Yuanqing predicts, "In the second half of 2024, the NPU (can reach) about 40 tops." "This means that large models on the device side can run much larger and faster.
In the second half of 2024, with the release of core new products, Apple and Huawei will soon encounter on the battlefield of device-side large models, which is a completely new field, and the real decisive battle will take place here.
Apple is slowing down
Apple's exploration of new technologies has never stopped, but it has been conservative in its application.
This year, Apple abandoned its decade-long plan to build a car, and billions of dollars went down the drain. It launched the Vision Pro in September 2023, defining the best MR experience to date, and Cook claimed to have started the spatial computing revolution, but it was expensive and high-barrier, and the technology did not progress as expected.
Yu Chengdong Source: Interviewee
Huawei, on the other hand, has given full play to its advantages at the application level. Yu Chengdong announced in early April that Huawei and Chery cooperated with the Zhijie S7, Yu Chengdong said on Weibo that this car "redefines the smart car in the intelligent era", and it also launched the new M5, known as Huawei's high-end intelligent driving application landing.
Let's take a look at Meta, which is also in Silicon Valley. On April 22, Zuckerberg announced that Meta's Quest headset operating system will be opened to device manufacturers and other partners, such as Microsoft, Lenovo, Asus and other computer manufacturers, just as Google opened up its Android system, which indicates that the arrival of the popular metaverse is accelerating.
One of the criticisms Mr. Cook faces is that Apple's ability to innovate is waning because the technology curve for things like multi-touch screens and software innovation has slowed and shifted to generative AI with large models at its core, and it's steeper than the mobile internet innovation curve, which is the domain and kingdom of companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.
In June, Apple will hold its Worldwide Developers Conference, where Cook may announce Apple's AI strategy. How will many classic products such as iPhones, Macs, and watches be AI, and how to incorporate large-scale model technology into products, which are likely to be launched in September, people are curious about how companies known for their product power and user experience can make ordinary people accept and apply AI to life.
Apple plans to introduce third-party large models to solve some of the problems, and it has already spoken to Google and OpenAI. In the Chinese market, Baidu will provide AI capabilities for Apple's 2024 release of the National Bank iPhone 16, Mac system and iOS 18. However, due to technical inertia, Apple is developing its own basic large model to solve problems such as user experience and data privacy and security.
However, none of the above news has been officially confirmed by Apple.
Chip makers are already gearing up, and according to media reports, Nvidia has begun to design a central processing unit (CPU) capable of running Microsoft's Windows operating system and using Arm's technology. AMD also plans to manufacture Arm-based PC chips. Apple's M-series chips will come under increasing pressure, although it still has a technological advantage.
The steeper the technology curve, the higher the probability of technology disrupting large companies. At that time, because it ignored the threat of smartphones and failed to launch disruptive products in a timely manner, it took only five years for Nokia to fall from the peak of the mobile phone market to bankruptcy. Apple or Huawei certainly don't want to be the next Nokia, and the card in their hands now is AI.