Huawei TechWave Summit 2023 explores how latest digital technologies can unleash digital productivity

Under the theme of ‘AI for Industries’, Huawei Cloud held the TechWave Summit Middle East & Central Asia 2023 recently in Almaty, Kazakhstan, bringing together leading Huawei Cloud experts, customers and partners to explore how AI, powered by the latest advances in Cloud, is driving new value and accelerating the digital economy.

During the TechWave Summit which was held on the side-lines of the Huawei Middle East & Central Asia (ME&CA) Tech Carnival 2023, the company’s flagship annual event, which took place in Kazakhstan for the first time, Huawei Cloud launched a range of new AI solutions, released a Pre-Trained Models White Paper and announced a new Huawei Cloud Stack (HCS) to accelerate the intelligent upgrade across governments and industries for Middle East and Central Asia.

At the event, Frank Dai, President of Huawei Cloud Middle East & Central Asia, highlighted Huawei’s first mover-advantage in industry digitalisation. “We believe AI for Industries will be the next big tipping point. Huawei Cloud offers pre-trained Pangu models with hundreds of billions of parameters to help drive industrial-scale AI development so that AI’s power can truly be unleashed across industries.”

To further explore the application of AI across industries, Huawei Cloud held an AI roundtable together with Prof. Peter Sachsenmeier (Fellow of German National Academy of Science and Engineering), industry experts, and leading companies to share and discuss the latest AI trends, best practices of AI applications, the impact of large models on AI adoption, and how to accelerate AI adoption in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Professor Peter Sachsenmeier, industrial strategist and Fellow of German National Academy of Science and Engineering shared his insights of AI’s promising potential of accelerating the digital transformation of industries. He said: “All industries are facing the challenges from inevitable trend of digital transformation.” Professor Sachsenmeier emphasized that the very goal of digital transformation is to relief workers in traditional industries from repetitive, labor-intensive tasks, and to improve working environment as well as general efficiency.

“We all agree on the potential of AI. It is comparable to the acceleration when browsers made the internet widely accessible. Traditional tech is mostly about drafting, revising, editing. AI, by contrast, can find patterns we cannot see, is able to provide analysis, predictions, suggestions on its own. So, let us rethink that AI is not a set of tools, but a set of systems with which we can collaborate.” Professor Sachsenmeier said, “The rapid development and vast application of large model AI brings great opportunities.”

However, in the industrial applications, AI is facing differentiated demands from complicated scenarios. The answer can be found in a Huawei Pre-Trained Model White Paper that was officially released in the earlier session of the TechWave Summit. Large models use massive general data and industry data training, which improves the generalisation capability and universality of the model. Pre-trained models on massive datasets with large-scale deep neural networks can effectively reduce the cost of computing resources of AI.

Dr. Zhu Shenggao, the Vice President of Huawei Cloud Middle East & Central Asia AI Business shared Huawei’s solutions to address the complexity of the industrial application of AI with the help of pre-trained models. “AI has entered into core production systems and has started creating greater value, the penetration rate of the AI industry accelerates and will reach 20% in 2026.” Dr. Zhu told the participants of the roundtable, “This is why Huawei Cloud puts forward AI for Industries strategies. The large industry model is the key to solve the traditional AI workshop and help our industries to give them the powerful tools to solve the different scenarios.”

Taking the Pangu series of AI models for example, using hundreds of billions of parameters, the pre-trained Pangu models are proven effective in more than 100 cases of over 10 vertical industries. One year after its debut in 2021, the Pangu Model has been adapted in coal mines, electric power, cement, finance and national cloud. In recent years, Huawei Cloud has developed more than 1,000 AI projects. Over 30% of AI projects have entered the core production system, bringing an extra 18% profitability to customers in general.

In Middle East and Central Asia, Huawei Cloud will focus on in-depth digital transformation, accelerate cloud native and service innovation, and build the best services for business to continuously create value for customers and partners.

The data customised analysing ability for different industries of large model AI is the advanced application based on massive dataset. The cloud native solutions are the integrated solutions for the infrastructure resources of computing, storage and networks, which is the very foundation of the industrial application of AI. Through cloud native, Huawei seeks for accelerating innovation, to maximise data value and differentiated application of AI. Supported by the over 4 million developers worldwide, Huawei Cloud continuously invests in R&D innovation and constructing the best cloud platform.

At the roundtable, the speakers along with partners of Huawei Cloud dived into the challenges that enterprises and governments face during their digital transformation journey as well as Huawei’s advances in cloud services and ecosystem partner solutions. Huawei Cloud will provide Everything as a Service, and is committed to building the cloud foundation for an intelligent world, with ubiquitous cloud and pervasive intelligence.

To download the Huawei Pre-Trained Model White Paper, please visit:  https://bit.ly/3MIr7Nu

Huawei Cloud aims to build a cloud foundation for an intelligent world with Everything-as-a-Service. Looking ahead, Huawei Cloud will continue to expand its global cloud infrastructure and provide customers, partners, and developers with stable, secure, and sustainable cloud services.