In short: Huawei’s ambitions in the artificial intelligence segment are growing, with the company’s focus on machine learning and more general AI applications now encompassing everything from smartphone software to hardware, cameras, vehicles, wireless technologies, and even city infrastructure. The firm will be highlighting its efforts in the field with a focus on what it calls “ubiquitous connectivity” and “pervasive intelligence,” referring to its IoT initiatives and deep learning solutions, both of which are meant to build toward a fully connected world permeated and at least partially managed by AI.
Huawei’s approach to marketing its AI ambitions going forward will be highly structured, with the company already filing to trademark some of the key terms it’s going to use to that end, according to newly published IP documentation reviewed by AndroidHeadlines. Additionally, Huawei’s subsidiary Honor will be sticking with the “Magic UI” moniker of its Android implementation moving forward, AndroidHeadlines can confirm. Finally, the firm is looking to launch a global AI forum named after its Da Vinci architecture used for the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 data center chips announced earlier this week. The “Da Vinci Forum” will be global in nature, with Huawei being likely to start hosting first symposiums organized under its branding in the near future.
Background: The name of the initiative has already been unofficially floating around the Chinese tech giant for some time now; this summer, The Information reported that company executives are pursuing “Project Da Vinci,” also referred to as “Project D,” a comprehensive program aimed at eventually infusing every one of its products and services with AI. The aforementioned Ascend chips have been designed as part of the same initiative and are specifically taking aim at Qualcomm and NVIDIA’s dominance in the data center field. Huawei has already been selling cloud services for years, so pairing those solutions with first-party hardware is the next logical step on its road to improved profitability and general growth.
In addition to AI innovations on the most basic (chip) level, Huawei is also pursuing investments in their advanced applications such as smart cities. Simultaneously, the firm is committing significant resources toward maintaining its status of the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer, a title that will become all the more valuable once 5G networks become a commercial reality.
Impact: Huawei’s current plan is to use AI to interweave all of its tech divisions such as consumer electronics, network infrastructure, and IoT into a single massive ecosystem of products and services which would power societies of the future and put the company into an ideal position for sustainable long-term growth. While its issues with Western governments concerned about its close ties to Beijing and associated spying risks are still as present as ever, the conglomerate’s increasing focus on intellectual property could see it establish itself as an unavoidable stop on the road to next-gen telecommunications and other segments supported by the thereof. Huawei’s current problem is communicating that message to the global tech industry, which is where the Da Vinci Forum and other similar initiatives will come in, seeking to summarize its claim to the title of one of the world’s most innovative tech companies across a wide variety of sectors.