By: Syeda Shehr Bano

Embedded within the massive GITEX GLOBAL 2023 extravaganza was AI Everything, spanning a total of 10 halls and featuring 3,500+ AI companies and startups. Ground breaking conferences from the world-leaders in AI, startups and traditional businesses at the frontier of AI development and experts with an eye to the future came together to show why AI adoption is a priority.

According to PwC’s Global Artificial Intelligence Study, AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 provided strategic investment in different types of AI technology is made. Labour productivity improvements will drive initial GDP gains as firms seek to “augment” the productivity of their labour force with AI technologies and to automate some tasks and roles. The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact.

Adoption of AI has skyrocketed in 2023, with all industries exploring new ways to utilize the latest available technology to improve efficiency, cut operating costs and improve business sustainability. Recent massive leaps forward in AI development and software have made variants such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard far more accessible to the public. As AI is becoming mainstream, GITEX GLOBAL provided a platform for the latest thoughts and ideas on the AI wave encompassing the world.

AI has entered into core production systems and has started creating greater value, with AI adoption expected to reach 20% by 2026 in major industries. These latest technologies will revolutionize multiple industries and raise the bar for global productivity and competitiveness.

The event also served as the launch pad for intelligent industry solutions designed to meet the specific needs of different industries, including public services, finance, oil & gas, electric power, transportation and ISP. Huawei showcased the latest breakthroughs in intelligent ICT innovations that unlock the immense potential of Cloud, namely the Intelligent Cloud-Network to accelerate intelligent upgrades, which fully unleashes computing power with super-connectivity for unsurpassed AI productivity in the AI era, the Pangu model 3.0 and Huawei Cloud Stack 8.3.0.

I attended a fascinating session – the keynote on ‘Pangu Large Models Accelerate AI for Industries’, Dr. Zhu Shenggao, Vice President of AI Business of Huawei Cloud Middle East and Central Asia. Dr. Shenggao said, “AI has become an integral part of our society, permeating every aspect of our lives. Its adoption in industries is undergoing a rapid transformation. This remarkable shift is being driven by the emergence of large AI models meticulously trained on massive datasets. It is not just a technological advancement, but a fundamental shift that will shape the future of industries, and Huawei Cloud is at the forefront of enabling this transformation.”

Huawei Cloud Pangu models are designed to focus on the practical needs of specific industry scenarios. The newly-launched Pangu Models 3.0 use a 5+N+X three-layer decoupled, hierarchical architecture, consists of 5 – L0 foundation models, N – L1 industry-tailored models, and X – L2 AI applications, offering a powerful foundation for a vast range of models and applications. The L0 layer of foundation models consists of NLP, CV, multimodal, prediction, and scientific computing, which provide general skills to power an endless possibility of industry-specific applications.

Pangu models have been pre-trained with open datasets from more than 10 industries, including Finance, Government, Meteorology, Healthcare, Education, Automotive, and Utilities. The data volume of each industry exceeds 50 billion tokens. As AI spreads to all aspects of human existence, the emergence of large AI models meticulously trained on massive datasets, is a fundamental shift in technological advancement.