Huawei Launches OpenLab 3.0 for Innovation
“Enterprises and entrepreneurs trying to invent the world of tomorrow realize that a lot of what we build today is based on what we learned yesterday,“ said Ashley Fernandez, Chief Data & AI Officer for Huawei Singapore.
But building solely on yesteryear’s “digital pavements” could stymie genuine innovation. He said: “What we think we want to invent is already obsolete yesterday. So fabricating, building, and developing the capabilities we need requires an entirely different construct around how we invent.”
Launch of OpenLab 3.0 in Singapore
Fernandez was one of several speakers at the official launch of OpenLab 3.0 in Singapore last week, Huawei’s latest regional center designed for joint solution innovation, partner enablement, and development.
Huawei OpenLab was first launched in Singapore in 2016 and has since welcomed over 6,000 industry visitors from the region. According to Huawei, it has been instrumental in forging collaborations with more than 100 partners to create customer-centric solutions. The latest upgrade comes to the tune of USD20 million and was envisioned to help organizations accelerate technological progression and achieve innovation excellence.
At the launch, Foo Fang Yong, chief executive officer of Huawei International elaborated on the mission of OpenLab 3.0.
“OpenLab 1.0 to 2.0 is looking at tomorrow from today’s perspective. OpenLab 3.0 is cooperating with our partners to look at tomorrow from the day after tomorrow’s perspective and explore more possibilities in the future through our comprehensive innovative R&D capabilities and investment,“ he said.
“[We want to incubate and enable] more future-oriented local applications and innovative solutions, while promoting them to the entire Asia-Pacific region to support digital transformation of various industries.”
Innovation in 3D
In his keynote, Fernandez observed that the pace of innovation is increasing. He pointed to how it took a thousand years for paper to reach Europe, but just 80 years for the automobile to reach the masses. And it only got faster from there: “Computers took 20 years, Instagram took just two and a half months to reach a million users, and ChatGPT – everybody knows what it is.”
In a nutshell, how we think about innovation and the speed at which products can come to market is “very, very different” today. Drawing upon international chess as an analogy, Fernandez said: “We're no longer playing 2D chess. We are actually in an environment where we're playing 3D chess if you think about the landscape of how things have actually evolved.”
He used the evolution of AI to further illustrate his point. “AI models used to be quite siloed. If I want to do facial recognition I’ll use a facial recognition model; if I want to do gestural detection, I'll use the gesture detection model,” he said.
“Imagine yourself crossing an extremely busy road today. The first thing we do as humans is that we need to get my visual right; you can't see you can't cross. The second thing we do is, we temporally correlate, which means we're timing each vehicle. And we have to know my pace to know when to cross the road. We essentially combine these inputs and make a probabilistic bet,” said Fernandez.
“We are in a world where everything is converging. Models are becoming converged. Models are getting unified into multi-modularity. That changes everything. The whole evolution of AI is basically converging towards that; it needs to be modularized because that's where you get true intelligence.”
As we wrote previously, the recently-released GPT-4 is technically a multimodal model that can accept image and text inputs, though its ability to accept images is under preview at the moment.
Mapping out the future
So how does OpenLab come into the picture? “A lot of the biggest breakthroughs came through a partnership, it came through an open platform, and we are attempting to solve these key challenges through OpenLab.”
“If you are a platform if you are a partner, these are the three key things that we always try to kind of build solutions by connectivity, data, and intelligence. And most often, we have to basically take multiple different parts and stitch them together. And that requires R&D, it requires engineering.” And the ability to build everything within one ecosystem without “jumping left or right” would be a huge benefit, said Fernandez.
“This is basically what this whole setup is about. How can I basically get connectivity, data, and intelligence in one single fabric or a single piece of glass… And that's exactly what OpenLab is about,” he summed up.
“The booming digital economy in the Asia-Pacific region will lead to new innovative services and applications. To accelerate the digitalization of industries, a more open and diversified industry ecosystem is required,” said Nicholas Ma, president of Huawei APAC Enterprise Business Group.
“OpenLab 3.0 is a global technology platform for partners and institutions of higher learning in the Asia-Pacific region. It provides innovative industry solutions based on the demands of various industries and continuously contributes to building a digital Asia-Pacific region.”
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: Huawei
