If the world’s business decision-makers are suffering from AI fatigue, last week’s Lenovo Tech World 2024 in Seattle served as a powerful wake-up call.
A lineup of some of the most powerful leaders of the technology sector joined in a keynote event with Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo, the world’s biggest computer maker. The CEOs of Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Qualcomm, AMD and Intel were all on hand to put an exclamation mark on groundbreaking announcements made at the event.
The most significant of these was not a product launch, but an announcement by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger of an alliance between rival chip and computer makers to shape the future of x86, the world’s most widely used architecture for personal computers and laptops. This meant bitter rivals Intel and AMD would come together with the likes of Google, Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Dell and Lenovo to foster compatibility across platforms and create innovative solutions for the future.
The resultant x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group has been described as an all-star alliance, and marks another remarkable peace declaration of the kind that has characterised the past year in technology. Previously, rival cloud giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle announced partnerships to allow for compatibility between their platforms.
“Rumours of my death are severely exaggerated,” the embattled Gelsinger said of Intel during the keynote event. “We are alive and well, and the x86 is thriving.
“The advisory group brings together leaders from across the ecosystem to shape the future of the x86 to simplify software development, to ensure interoperability and interface consistency, to provide developers with standard architecture tools, instruction sets, to have a clear view of the future.
“We think of it as one of the most significant periods of innovation in front of us, and we see that the x86 architecture, this foundation of computing for decades, is about to go through a period of customisation, expansion, scalability.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su also offered an olive branch that, she said, showed “just how unique a time this is in technology”.
“What we’re trying to do is accelerate compute and accelerate the adoption of compute,” she said. “The idea is that AMD and Intel are bringing together all of these founding members (to) really accelerate the pace of innovation going forward.”
There is one common theme that underlies the numerous alliances, partnerships and cessations of hostilities: the massive impact of AI. It has led to unprecedented growth and opportunity, but also a threat to upend both the hardware and software industries. By working together, the tech giants are better able to harness AI rather than be trampled in its stampede.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put in in context during his address to the conference: “For years, we have brought together Lenovo’s devices and services with the power of our entire tech stack to help customers around the world, in every industry and across every sector of the economy. And today, we’re building on these investments to accelerate AI adoption and drive the next level of value for our shared customers.”
He said it was “fantastic” to see how Lenovo was bringing a new category of AI devices to life, “partnering across the entire silicon ecosystem, from AMD and Intel to Qualcomm”. His parting shot: “This is just the beginning.”
Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon said that this year “marked the start of one of the most significant transitions in personal computing, driven by AI capabilities that fundamentally change how we interact with our PCs”.
For Lenovo’s part, the big focus of Tech World 2024 was the concept of Hybrid AI, a way of combining different types of AI tools and systems to make them more adaptable and useful across a range of business environments. The climax of the conference was the appearance on stage, alongside Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has become the superstar of the processor world thanks to his company’s chips underpinning the AI revolution.
Together, the two CEOs unveiled Lenovo’s Hybrid AI Advantage framework, developed in collaboration with Nvidia. It is designed to empower businesses to integrate AI seamlessly across their operations.
“This is an end-to-end AI platform for developing and deploying AI in a new era,” said Yuanqing. “It is our industry-leading infrastructure, including AI devices, AI services, storage, as well as edge computing, public cloud, private cloud, where enterprise data is stored cleansed and organised. So (it is) data, algorithms and accelerated computing power together in enterprises.”
Yuanqing told Gadget after the keynote that combining public cloud AI with enterprise AI models was one of the big challenges of hybrid AI, hence the new Advantage framework
“There are a lot of challenges for our customers,” he said. “So, as we showed, we provide value by offering the full stack of elements so that we can provide the services to help them to design, deploy, scale and maintain. We help the user to cleanse the data, to analyse the data, to choose the different language models. We have the horizontal building blocks as well as vertical capabilities. So, if we have that kind of knowledge and experience, we can help our customers to overcome the challenge of hybrid AI.”
There was little mention at the conference of the big names in generative AI, like OpenAI, creator of the Chat GPT large language model (LLM), and Google Gemini. Lenovo works closely with Microsoft in deploying its Copilot smart assistant, and with Meta to use its Llama 2 LLM in business operations.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at Tech World to remind delegates that Lenovo’s new personal AI was built on Llama.
“It’s really transforming the PC into a much more useful and personalised device,” he said. “This is a big part of why we open-source Llama, so that companies like Lenovo can fine-tune the LLM to optimise it for specific use cases. We just announced Llama 3.2, our first open source multimodal model.”
In multimodal AI, the model can produce a combination of text, graphics, audio and video based on a brief prompt.
“We believe that open source is the most cost effective, customisable, trustworthy and performant option out there,” Zuckerberg said. “And now that Llama is at the frontier, it is starting to become something of an industry standard, like the Linux of AI. By building with llama, Lenovo has played a big part in getting us to that inflection point and is bringing impressive experiences to its customers.”
This echoed Yuanqing’s opening statements at the start of the conference: “It’s all about using AI to build a smarter future together. Lenovo believes that AI is real. It’s not another fleeting trend. It’s not an inflated bubble. AI is already improving the quality of life for individuals, (and) delivering higher productivity for enterprises.”
- A version of this article first appeared in The Sunday Times.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on social media on @art2gee.