A range of industries are set to be transformed by the artificial intelligence (AI) tools built into new products from Huawei Cloud.
At the opening of Huawei Developer Conference in Dongguan, China, last week, Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei Cloud, announced the launch of Huawei Cloud Pangu Models 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services, aimed at “reshaping industries, honing technologies, and sharing success”.
Pangu Models 3.0 will focus on building up core competitiveness and helping customers, partners, and developers operationalise AI, while Ascend AI cloud services can train a multi-billion parameter model. Thanks to more reliable AI computing power, such large models are now more accessible to industry customers.
“Pangu models were born to serve industry-specific needs, and we are here to help customers from every industry to develop and use large models to solve their problems in ways never seen before,” said Zhang.
So far, the Pangu Mining Model has been used at eight coal mines in China. A single model can support more than 1,000 sub-scenarios for coal mining, including digging, drivage, equipment control, transport, ventilation, and coal washing.
It helps to build safer, more intelligent coal mines that can run efficiently with just a small underground crew or even no underground crew at all.
On railways, the Pangu Railway Model can accurately identify 67 types of freight cars and over 430 types of faults found on railways and freight cars. It can quickly scan millions of images captured by the railway TFDS system and filter out 95% of the images that are fault-free.
This way, train inspectors can focus on the remaining images, and this helps them improve both efficiency and accuracy.
In meteorology, the Pangu Meteorology Model (or Pangu-Weather) is the first AI model to have surpassed state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods in terms of accuracy. The prediction speed is also several orders of magnitude faster.
In the past, predicting the trajectory of a typhoon over 10 days took 4 to 5 hours of simulation on a high-performance cluster of 3,000 servers. Now, the Pangu model can do it in 10 seconds on a single GPU of a single server, and with more accurate results.
In financial services, the Pangu Finance Model, pre-trained on large datasets containing data about bank policies, procedures, and case studies, can automatically generate the correct service workflows and guides for bank tellers based on the customers’ service requests. This helps them handle service requests more efficiently and confidently.
Essentially, the Pangu Finance Model has given each bank employee their own personal intelligent assistant.
In manufacturing, in the past, it took more than three hours to develop a one-day parts allocation plan for a single production line. The Pangu Manufacturing Model, pre-trained on data about parts and components, business processes, and rules from Huawei’s own production lines, is capable of accurate intent understanding.
By calling the Huawei OptVerse AI Solver plugin, the Pangu model can develop a 3-day production plan in just 1 minute.
In the field of drug R&D, developing a new drug used to take an average of 10 years and US$1-billion. Now, the Pangu Drug Molecule Model is able to accelerate lead compound discovery from several years to just one month, reducing drug R&D costs by 70%.
Using this model, a team led by Professor Liu Bing of Xi’an Jiaotong University recently discovered a new superantibiotic — the first new antibiotic to be discovered in 40 years, with brand-new protein targets and in a category of its own.
In addition to better AI models, Huawei Cloud enhances the underlying technologies that power AI. These include an AI compute cloud platform built on Kunpeng and Ascend, CANN (a heterogeneous computing architecture), MindSpore (an all-scenario AI framework), and ModelArts (AI development pipeline).
Beyond implementations across industries, Pangu models are also integrated into Huawei Cloud products and services as a massive productivity boost.
For example, Pangu automatically generates copywriting and code, speeding up product launches and user onboarding for new offerings.
Cloud customer service embeds industry knowledge and intent mining, improving full-process efficiency by 30% through first-AI-then-human responses.
For business intelligence (BI), NL2SQL and AutoGraph support automatic recommendations of visual charts from SQL statements. Multiple rounds of natural language interaction make it easier to present insights from data.
In cloud search, multi-modal embedding and NL2API increase search accuracy for videos, texts, and graphs by 15% through powerful semantic understanding and generalisation.
In addition, Huawei Cloud combines CodeArts with Pangu to build CodeArts Snap, an intelligent programming assistant for developers. Trained with 76 billion lines of quality code and 13 million technical documents, CodeArts Snap makes generation, Q&A, and collaboration smarter. It generates code through one dialogue, automatically comments out and generates test cases in one click, and deploys services/apps with one instruction.
Content production and innovation are another two major themes in AI. Built on Pangu foundation models, Huawei Cloud empowers MetaStudio — a digital content production pipeline — and builds the Pangu Virtual Human Model that supports model generation and model control, trained with 200,000 hours of video and audio.
Model generation and control enable easily building virtual humans for online education, entertainment, livestreaming, meetings, and more. For example, a personalised virtual human can come to life in just three minutes by uploading a 20-second video on Huawei Cloud MetaStudio’s service page. Previously this took three days and three R&D engineers.
