GITEX GLOBAL - The Year to Imagine AI in Everything

GITEX GLOBAL, which took place this week at the Dubai World Trade Centre, is a confluence of pioneering companies, influential thinkers, and proactive governments collaboratively reimagining the AI economy and its trajectory.

His Highness, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, inaugurated GITEX GLOBAL. His endorsement underpins Dubai's prominence as a global tech hub, hosting one of the most significant gatherings of technology professionals worldwide. The event has over 6,000 exhibitors from 180 countries, with approximately 120,000 attendees converging to discuss the industry's transformative direction.

Under the banner of 'Everything as a Service, Reshaping AI for Industries', Huawei, a Gold Sponsor, platformed how it can support organisations to reimagine their digital transformation and innovation strategies. Two offerings, in particular, caught my interest: Huawei Cloud MetaStudio and Huawei's Pangu Models 3.0.

MetaStudio is a cloud-based digital production platform encompassing five pivotal features: creation, storage, editing, simulation, and rendering. This suite seamlessly blends virtual and real human experiences across both realms. Remarkably, with MetaStudio, a photograph can be converted into a 3D digital human in just 5 seconds. This technology enables users to generate live broadcasts through text, voice, or visual mediums.

My conversation with Frank Dai, President of Huawei Cloud for the Middle East and Central Asia, was enlightening. With his digital avatar conversing fluently in Arabic in the background, Frank elaborated on the comprehensive range of services, from spatial positioning and virtual cognition to synchronised multi-user status, spatial audio and an extensive application distribution network (ADN). He emphasised the embedding of its Pangu Model within MetaStudio, with its dataset of 200,000 hours of audio-visual content.

In a separate discussion, Dr Zhu Shenggao, Vice President of AI Business for the Middle East and Central Asia, detailed Huawei’s Pangu Large Models. He highlighted the model's comprehensive training on datasets spanning more than 10 industries, each exceeding 50 billion tokens. These industries range from government to finance, healthcare, automotive, mining and retail. Customers can load independent datasets to train their own models, or they can choose to upgrade foundation models or capability sets. The L0 layer comprises Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), multimodal, predictive analytics, and scientific computation. Building on these, the L1 layer provides industry-specific models, while the L2 offers task-oriented models ready for immediate deployment. Emphasising Huawei's commitment to the Middle East, Dr Zhu noted that the Pangu Models 3.0 is the region's first commercial Arabic model, trained on hundreds of billions of parameters.

Events like GITEX GLOBAL illustrate the rapid evolution and fusion of technology and human experiences. The cutting-edge innovations presented by many organisations at the event signify the myriad of possibilities for our digital future.