How do we understand AI? Is it Alpha Go, who was once declared a god? Is it the fantasy driverless technology? Or is it a series of dense codes? In short, AI used to be out of reach, cold, and expensive. However, in May 2018, Huawei Cloud proposed such an idea: to let AI step down from the altar, and also outlined a vision called "Inclusive AI".
Is it possible for artificial intelligence technology to become an existence like water, electricity, and gas? The answer given by Huawei Cloud is yes.
Huawei predicts that the number of smart terminals will reach 40 billion by 2025. By then, the adoption rate of AI by global enterprises will reach 86%, and the enterprise data utilization rate will increase sharply to around 80%. Soon, the reality that AI will penetrate into every aspect of life and every corner of every walk of life is about to be reached.
When AI moves from laboratories to cities, enters enterprises, enters streets and lanes, and enters everyone's home, it needs to become "high but not expensive." Huawei Cloud believes that the most important thing about the so-called "inclusive AI" is that ordinary industry practitioners can also use AI artificial intelligence technology to self-service combine digital technology with the processes of the industry to form new intelligent connections. Intelligent connections will drive unprecedented large-scale innovation, and new business models and applications based on intelligent connections will change the operating model of enterprises and the consumption patterns of products and services, promote the scale development of the digital economy, and eventually move toward an intelligent economy.
In May 2018, Huawei Cloud first proposed the concept of "inclusive AI" at the China International Big Data Industry Expo. In the eyes of Huawei Cloud, AI should be a set of technologies and a new universal technology. It is not simply an independent product, nor a closed system. AI should also become a basic productivity like electricity and the Internet. Through intelligent connection, the efficiency of many industries can be improved exponentially. This is not only the starting point of Huawei Cloud's "inclusive AI", but also what AI should look like in the future.
With the proposal and practice of Huawei Cloud's "Inclusive AI" concept, AI technology has begun to slowly move closer to what it should be.
An example that comes into reality is the development of Huawei Cloud EI. This year, Huawei Cloud cooperated with the Beijing Municipal Traffic Management Bureau to launch a pilot application using AI technology to optimize signal timing in Shangdi Third Street, Haidian. After deploying the EI traffic intelligence solution, according to an evaluation report by a third-party company (Beijing Century Qualcomm Technology Co., Ltd.), the average delay on this east-west road, one of the most congested in Beijing, has dropped by 15.2% and the average speed has increased. 15. Perhaps the white-collar workers who commute to Shangdi Third Street every day don’t know what AI is, but they are curious about this road that has become less congested.
Similarly, another less congested road has also landed in Shenzhen. The Shenzhen Traffic Police applied Huawei Cloud's EI intelligent agent to urban traffic management, using artificial intelligence technology at nine intersections in Bantian. The average vehicle speed increased by 17%, and the commuting time was saved by 10 minutes. A cup of morning tea lasted just like this, without even realizing it. Time is saved.
In 2018, Huawei Cloud’s “inclusive AI” not only penetrated cities, but also landed in the industrial and medical fields. In the industrial field, for example, Beijing Sanlian Hongpu uses EI industrial intelligence to conduct intelligent analysis of production data, successfully releasing the flexibility of production lines, allowing companies to better respond to personalized downstream needs, and effectively improve the matching rate of downstream demand. 28.5; in the medical field, Huawei Cloud EI has cooperated with KingMed Medical to achieve a phased breakthrough in the field of cervical cancer pathological monitoring, with a sensitivity (true positive rate) exceeding 99 and a specificity (true negative rate) exceeding 80.
In the past year, Huawei Cloud EI has tried more than 200 projects. From June to October, it has released three major EI intelligent agents for transportation, industry, and city. This is one of the "inclusive AI" solutions. . And this is just a product of the nascent stage of "inclusive AI", which only "revealed its sharp edges" in 2018.
What makes Huawei Cloud’s “Inclusive AI” different from other manufacturers in the industry is that it makes up for the huge gap between the development of AI technology and the implementation of the industry in the process of moving towards a smart economy. How to make AI high but not expensive, so that all walks of life can be "affordable, useful, and safe to use"? How to connect it to various scenarios in various industries and make AI the foundation of the smart economy? This requires "inclusive AI" to be inclusive not only of software, but also of hardware and engineering. So, in this process, the cornerstone of talent and technology must not be bypassed.
At the Huawei Full Connectivity Conference in October 2018, Huawei released a "full-stack, full-scenario" AI solution, demonstrating another way to implement Huawei Cloud's "inclusive AI", that is, AI development costs and the lowering of barriers to entry, which means that developers and practitioners in the industry can stand on the Huawei Cloud platform and cross the once high threshold to confront AI. In the past we looked up to AI, but in the future AI can be everywhere.
Huawei Cloud's "full stack" is a full-stack technical solution from the perspective of technical functions, including chips, chip enablement, training and inference frameworks, and application enablement; the so-called "full scenario" includes Deployment environments for all scenarios including public cloud, private cloud, various edge computing, IoT industry terminals, and consumer terminals. Among them, Huawei Cloud's full-scenario AI is an integrated solution of software and hardware. This is also the unique feature of Huawei Cloud's "inclusive AI": including a series of AI IP and chip Ascend 910 (Huawei Ascend 9100) based on a unified and scalable architecture. and Ascend 310 (Huawei Ascend 310); chip operator library and highly automated operator development tool CANN; MindSpore, a unified training and inference framework that supports device, edge, and cloud independence and collaboration; and provides full-process development services (ModelArts), Application enablement of layered APIs and pre-integrated solutions.
Specifically, for example, Huawei's self-developed AI chip Ascend series is based on a unified "Da Vinci" architecture. Its advantages include one-time operator development, scalable computing power, and consistent development and debugging. Experience and develop once with smooth migration across various scenarios, ultra-high bandwidth, extremely low latency, and scalable on-chip interconnection. The Ascend series of chips based on the unified DaVinci architecture can achieve optimal performance at the lowest cost in any scenario. In terms of engineering, compared with other development platforms in the industry, ModelArts is a faster and inclusive AI development platform, covering the entire AI development process such as data annotation and preparation, model training, model tuning, and model deployment, providing a comprehensive platform for AI application development. Stop service.
Relying on Huawei’s 30 years of technology accumulation, in Huawei Cloud’s view, AI is not high. Relying on Huawei Cloud's "full-stack, full-scenario" AI solution, Huawei Cloud wants industry practitioners to have the same platform and stand at the same height, so that AI development, application, debugging and other scenarios will no longer be cumbersome. . As of September 2018, Huawei Cloud has provided 45 artificial intelligence services covering 142 functions, plus the AI ??development platform ModelArts, AI application development platform HiLens, quantum computing simulator and programming framework HiQ, as well as consistent online experience The offline development kit Atlas200 and so on have formed the inclusive capability of end-to-end engineering landing AI.
It is true that every industrial revolution is a process of transforming technology into productivity and a process of continuous expansion of advanced technology to ordinary people, and the smart era is no exception. With the development of AI, all industries will be involved in artificial intelligence technology, and the implementation of Huawei Cloud's "Inclusive AI" will undoubtedly shorten this process. At least, Huawei Cloud in 2018 showed us that AI can be used on the streets. (Text/Ningchuan)