BEIJING, September 20 (TMTPost)— Huawei Technologies’ founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei stressed the role of compute power technology in an upcoming industrial revolution.

Credit：Visual China

We are about to enter the magnificent fourth industrial revolution, which has an unimaginable scale and is based on great computing power, Ren told university students and other participants in Huawei-sponsored International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held in August, according to a transcript released this week. Ren expected young people nowadays will be the leader of the coming era of great computing power, and young stars will by all means shining brightly during the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that will take place within two or three decades.

Ren admitted Huawei has not been completely recovered from the ongoing sanctions imposed by U.S. and its allies, but noted the headwind can motivate the company to work harder.  "US sanctions have definitely put pressure on Huawei, but pressure is also motivation," Ren told the students in ICPC. The 78-year-old Huawei leader said his company was forced to change to another infrastructure platform due to sanctions, and after going through the transition, it has established its own platform, which may not necessarily run on the same foundation as the U.S. platform but will certainly be interconnected.

Ren suggested Huawei doesn’t want to target foreign companies as retaliation against sanctions from the West. He said he was against "xenophobia" towards any foreign brand and treated Apple as a teacher who can inspire Huawei on how to build good products. “We cherish the opportunity to learn from and compare with Apple,” he said. “You can call me an Apple fan in that sense.”

Today, the boundary between science and technology is getting smaller, and the time it takes for science to be transformed into technology is becoming less, Ren replied to a request for comments on so-called useless research that has no visible application in the near term. If any technology is not developed until universities fully understand relevant theory, we will lose first-mover advantage and competitiveness, the Chinese tech tycoon said. That’s why Huawei attaches importance to basic theoretical research and input about US$3 billion to US$5 billion every year on it.

Ren’s remark about computing power echoed his daughter Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s rotating chairperson and chief financial officer. "The development of AI is primarily driven by computing power. Large models require significant computing power, and the size of computing power determines the speed of AI iteration and innovation, as well as that of economic development," Meng said at the Huawei Connect 2023 Conference in Shanghai Wednesday.

Meng announced Huawei proposed the strategy of All Intelligence with the aim to accelerate the transition to intelligence in various sectors. She believes the scarcity and costliness of computing power have become key roadblocks to AI development. Huawei is committed to building China's computing power infrastructure and offering a second choice for the world, Meng said.

"From the era of small models to the era of large models, there has been a qualitative leap in the practicality of AI technology," Meng stated. In the past, different application scenarios required the development of different models. Now, a large model can adapt to multiple business scenarios, significantly lowering the barriers to AI development and application. This shortens the cycle from technology to application, making it possible to shift from workshop development and customized scenarios to industrialized development and scenario-specific optimization, and to solve industry problems based on large-scale models.