Whilst attending Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2024, Alix Pressley, our Head of Strategic Content, became more familiar with telco and cloud innovation. William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, discusses how the tech giant is helping its customers to progress and how cloud and AI are reshaping the future.
Over the past 10 years, there has been a huge development in cloud computing. More recently, there has been a rapid shift in the use and understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Both of these technologies together result in never-before-seen digital capabilities.
Large Models release the potential of AI
Cloud computing technology provides flexible and efficient computing services in the cloud for Large Models. The data scale of these Large Models is huge and therefore requires powerful computing support. It also provides a platform for easily developing, deploying and using Large Model applications.
Large Models are shaping the new paradigm of cloud computing application services. Generative AI has significantly reshaped the growth trajectory of cloud computing, meaning cloud providers have been propelled to revise their services based on these capabilities.
We hear from William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, who explores cloud capabilities and AI in more detail.
Can you shed some light on Huawei’s business strategy when it comes to cloud and AI – specifically about your development plans for the course of the year?
Huawei Cloud’s strategy is Everything-as-a-Service. For us, we would like to be the cloud foundation for industry digitalisation. We also want to empower and accelerate all industries’ digitalisation processes and contribute more resources to the global market. Up to now, we have over 84 availability zones globally and in these years we will launch new cloud regions. We want to continue expanding our global footprint and serve more countries and customers in the years to come.
How is AI shaping the future?
AI technology is booming. We hope that AI can help mankind to complete everyday tasks such as cleaning and washing clothes, so we have the time to paint a picture or write a song, for example. But now we find that AI can paint a picture or write a song and we still have to clean the room and wash clothes. So, back to our strategy for cloud and AI, we hope that we can use cloud technology and AI technology to help the industry solve the real challenge, the real problem. So I think for us we are more focused on AI for industry, AI for science. Based on this concept, we hope that we can provide the AI technology, including the infrastructure and our Pangu Large Models as well as industry know-how to help our customers and end-users accelerate their process to intelligent digitalisation.
How does your organisation’s digital infrastructure help with the digitalisation of industries and can you provide any examples where your technology has enhanced this?
In recent years, a paper about our Pangu Models has been published in Nature since it is used to do the weather forecast. This can change the way we do the weather forecast for HPC calculations. As well as this, it has been used for coal mining. Normally with coal mining, you find that the coal miner’s working environment is underground by around 300-500 metres, so sometimes you cannot hear anything if the machine is running but sometimes it is very quiet. Our models can help the machine to understand what happens underground in all kinds of scenarios. This enables the workers to work underground more efficiently.
I also believe that this reshaping of the industry has occurred in medical research since this industry can use Large Models to pre-train, to learn more about natural medicine and to learn the molecular structure of medicine. They can use the Large Models to predict the new medicine molecular structures. So based on this kind of technology they can accelerate the process to find new medicine, meaning AI – including Large Models – can reshape all industries. They can give everyone AI assistance and make our lives and our jobs, easier.
What’s a key message you want to communicate with existing or potential new customers and why is this important?
The key message is to accelerate the intelligence process with Everything-as-a-Service. So based on this, we will not only just provide cloud services to you, we also hope we can offer the capability of using cloud technology and AI technology more easily. You can build not just a used Large Model, you can also build your own models, your own AI applications. It should provide you with the possibility to use the innovative product, innovative cloud service, to accelerate your digitalisation process and your intelligent upgrade process.
You can view the video interview here.
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