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——Focus on digital intelligence and change business
ChatGPT was born and became popular all over the world. The technology world is entering the era of large models. In a chasing and exhilarating battle of hundreds of models, the United States (OpenAI, Meta, Google) and China's BATH (Baidu, Ali, Tencent, Huawei) have launched their own versions of large models without exception. . According to incomplete statistics, since the first half of 2023, nearly a hundred large models with more than one billion parameters have been released in China.
Amid all the turmoil in the technology world, Lenovo Group is one of the few tech giants absent from big-model development.
The absence of large model development does not mean that Lenovo is absent from generative AI. On the contrary, after years of continuous investment, Lenovo has a strong technical accumulation in artificial intelligence. According to Yang Jinghai, senior IT director of Lenovo Group, in the solution service business group of Lenovo Group, Lenovo doesn’t really care about developing a general-purpose large model. What Lenovo values is how to combine generative AI technology with industry solutions to truly benefit the industry. Empowering a certain industry to help the industry solve problems.
In fact, AI + industry solutions constitute one of the backbones of Lenovo's artificial intelligence strategy. After 20 years of experience in digitization and intelligence, plus billions of dollars in research and development investment, Lenovo has the confidence to digest large-scale models and generative AI technology, and become one of the main players in the field of artificial intelligence in China.
Huge investment, both analytical AI and generative AI
Lenovo's investment in artificial intelligence has gone through a long process, which is closely related to Lenovo's own service-oriented and intelligent transformation .
In 2017, Lenovo first proposed the concept of "intelligence", which started a long and painful transformation from a cocoon to a butterfly. This year, Lenovo announced that it will invest US$1.2 billion in four years for research and development of artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.
In June 2023, half a year after the popularity of generative AI, Lenovo announced an additional investment of US$1 billion within three years for artificial intelligence-related product research and development and ecological construction, accelerating the deployment of AI in global enterprises.
Facing the future of artificial intelligence, Lenovo adopts an inclusive approach. In Lenovo's view, generative AI has obvious advantages in some core capabilities, such as text-based question and answer, language translation, call voice analysis, interactive recommendation, etc.; at the same time, analytical AI also has capabilities that generative AI does not have. , such as operational optimization, customer intelligence analysis, predictive analysis, etc.
Two large-scale investments have laid Lenovo's foundation in the field of artificial intelligence. From analytical AI to generative AI, Lenovo has witnessed the whole process of domestic artificial intelligence investment. It is precisely because of continuous investment that artificial intelligence has gradually become another important technical anchor point of Lenovo in addition to computing power, occupying an increasingly core position in service-oriented and intelligent transformation.
Build an ecosystem and create 150 AI solutions a year
In addition to investing in research and development, Lenovo is also trying to combine artificial intelligence developers from all over the world to build an artificial intelligence ecosystem to serve customers together. In June 2023, while Lenovo announced additional investment in artificial intelligence, it also announced an AI innovator plan to build an ecosystem centered on Lenovo.
In the first year of the launch of the AI Innovator Program, Lenovo has reached strategic cooperation with 45 independent software developers worldwide and jointly created more than 150 AI solutions.
According to Hu Guanzhong, senior vice president, chief information officer, and chief technology and delivery officer of the solution service business group of Lenovo Group, among the US$1 billion invested in artificial intelligence by Lenovo, US$100 million was used to develop the AI Innovator Program. Relying on the AI Innovator Program, Lenovo will cooperate with domestic and foreign leaders in the AI field to create a first-class ecosystem and jointly provide customers with tailor-made, proven and ready-to-deploy AI solutions to meet end-to-end It is applicable to all walks of life.
For example, Lenovo has cooperated with DeepBrain AI to provide an end-to-end generative AI virtual assistant solution for use in hotel and retail environments. For another example, Lenovo and Vistry have cooperated to introduce kitchen solutions using computer vision technology for fast food restaurants around the world to realize automatic cooking time control...
Huge investment + ecosystem are two pillars of a strategy, showing Lenovo's strong determination to artificial intelligence. After long-term unremitting investment and investment, artificial intelligence has already become an inseparable part of Lenovo's intelligent core strategy.
Intelligent transformation, AI + industry solutions conquer the world
In 2019, two years after the first mention of "intelligence", Lenovo officially released a 3S strategy including Smart IoT (Intelligent Internet of Things), Smart Infrastructure (intelligent infrastructure), and Smart Vertical (vertical industry intelligence). As a key technology, artificial intelligence permeates all aspects of 3S and becomes one of the specific expressions of intelligence.
In 2021, Yang Yuanqing proposed a new IT concept of "device-edge-cloud-network-smart", and made a comprehensive layout around digitalization and intelligence. In three years, Lenovo spared no expense and added 8,800 R&D personnel, nearly doubling compared to the beginning of 2020. The "intelligence" in "device-edge-cloud-network-intelligence" refers to big data and artificial intelligence based on a four-tier computing architecture.
In Lenovo's Yang Jinghai's view, "device-edge-cloud-network-intelligence" is to build up layers of industry solutions in various fields, and "intelligence" refers to AI technology. AI technology is not combined with other centers, it is only the technology itself. "Device-Edge-Cloud-Network-Smart" combines technologies of different dimensions to form industry solutions.
After years of investment, AI has already penetrated into Lenovo's solution service business and infrastructure solution service business, and has become an important part of Lenovo's industry solutions.
At the Lenovo Innovation Open Day held in June, Lenovo took AI+ as the main line and demonstrated for the first time multiple industry solutions driven by AI underlying technology.
Big model gold panning, 70 products AI-Ready
The continuous investment in artificial intelligence has brought huge benefits to Lenovo in two aspects. In addition to the penetration of AI+ industry solutions in various industries, Lenovo's AI-Ready products have also achieved phenomenal success in the large-scale gold rush.
ChatGPT is popular all over the world, artificial intelligence 2.0 is within reach, and the technology world has launched a large-scale arms race. As a result, the global demand for computing power has exploded. It is said that to train a large AI model similar to ChatGPT, the starting computing power threshold is 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips. For Nvidia, which sells GPUs, this is a major benefit. Lenovo, which sells servers, is of course no exception.
According to IDC data, in the first quarter of 2023, Lenovo will be the biggest winner in the global x86 server market, with revenue increasing by nearly 40% year-on-year , and its global market share increasing to 7.1%. This is the third consecutive quarter that Lenovo's servers have maintained their No. 3 market position in the world.
Servers are the cornerstone of artificial intelligence algorithms. As a "shovel seller" of artificial intelligence, Lenovo and Nvidia have shared a wave of huge industry dividends.
Of course, in the ascendant artificial intelligence market, x86 servers are not Lenovo's only main category. When ChatGPT is popular all over the world, Lenovo's AI-Ready products have increased to more than 70 models, forming a spectacular product family. In June 2023, Lenovo Group announced that the annual revenue of the global AI infrastructure business has exceeded US$2 billion.
It is conceivable that with the continued popularity of generative AI and large language models, computing power giants such as Nvidia and Lenovo will inevitably reap greater fruits. For artificial intelligence, "selling shovels" Lenovo successfully bet.
According to Hu Guanzhong, in the face of the huge computing power demand of artificial intelligence, Lenovo Group provides customers with AI solutions through Lenovo TruScale computing power service to achieve maximum flexibility.
Keep calm, generative AI is not a panacea
In the 2022/23 fiscal year, Lenovo's two non-PC business groups, the Solution Service Business Group (SSG) achieved revenue of 45.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22%; the infrastructure solution service business group (ISG) achieved revenue of 66.8 billion yuan , an increase of 37% year-on-year.
The intelligent and service-oriented transformation driven by big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence technology is quietly recreating a new Lenovo. Lenovo, a computing power giant with an annual revenue of 424 billion yuan, has redefined its role after six years of unremitting efforts, and has gradually transformed from a hardware company to a full-stack, full-cycle service provider.
When analytical AI and generative AI penetrate into most of Lenovo's solution products, it can also be said that Lenovo is not only AI-Ready with more than 70 products , but the entire Lenovo company is also becoming AI-Ready and becoming the main force of China's intelligence a member of
Even so, Lenovo remains calm about the frenzy of generative AI. In Hu Guanzhong's view, generative AI is not a panacea, and it will not produce magical results just by using it. Generative AI is a technology, and technology is a tool . Any tool can only produce suitable results in suitable scenarios. effect……
Facing the new future of artificial intelligence, Lenovo, which combines analytical AI and generative AI, has made its own judgment.
Text: Bugle-X / Data Ape
