(JW Insights) May 5 --The founder and CEO of Chinese tech giant Huawei Ren Zhengfei has been putting out the word that the company will focus on the industrial use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in coming years, instead of following in the footsteps of Baidu and Alibaba and investing heavily in chatbots, Asia Times reported on May 4.

A detailed sample of his thinking came February 24 when Ren Zhengfei addressed students in a forum at the Shanghai Jiaotong University’s Advanced Industrial Technology Research Institute.

In the future, he said, 98% of AI applications in the market will serve industrial and agricultural needs while only 2% will serve consumers directly. Because of this, Huawei will not put a great deal of effort into the development of ChapGPT-like applications, he said.

On the same occasion, Ren said the company will set up a cloud-based system-simulation laboratory and connect it with its cloud hub in Guizhou. He said Chinese academics will be provided free computing resources to do their experiments, reported Asia Times.

(Yuan XY)