Tech Insider: Apple CEO Tries to Calm Investors, Huawei Chip Chosen to Power Mega AI Platform
Qualcomm isn’t sweating Huawei-developed chips, Ant Group cleared to roll out AI services
On Sept. 12 in California, Apple CEO Tim Cook showcased the new iPhone 15 Pro. Photo: VCG
With Huawei looming, Apple CEO tries to calm investor jitters
Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook said iPhone demand remains strong in China as he tried to allay investor concerns about the country’s shrinking smartphone market and competition from the unexpected comeback of Chinese rival Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
The U.S. tech giant reported record quarterly revenue for its iPhone business in China even as its total revenue there fell 2.5% year-on-year to $15.1 billion in the three months that ended Sept. 30, Cook told analysts Thursday.
If the overall China smartphone market is contracting — as analysts have said — Apple’s results suggest that it won market share in the last quarter, Cook said. Global iPhone sales grew 2.8% year-on-year to $43.8 billion.
Apple is facing fresh competition in China, where Huawei’s new smartphone has become a hit.
State-backed lab picks Huawei chip to power mega AI platform
A government-backed computer lab has announced that it will use a new version of Huawei’s Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chip to build what “will probably be the world’s largest” AI computing platform.
Cloud Brain III will use the new Ascend 910C processor and have up to 16,000 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point operations per second, of computing power, Peng Cheng Laboratory Director Gao Wen said Friday.
Gao expects the platform to debut around late 2024 to early 2025, Caixin has learned.
Peng Cheng developed its first-generation Cloud Brain in 2019, Gao said. It released an upgraded version of that platform in 2020 using Huawei’s Ascend 910A chip.
Qualcomm isn’t sweating Huawei-developed chips, CEO says
Qualcomm Inc.’s handset chip business in China will not be affected by Huawei’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency, CEO Cristiano Amon said.
Despite Huawei’s return to the mobile arena spotlight with an in-house chip, the growth trajectory of Qualcomm’s business with Android handset-makers in China will remain unchanged, according to Amon on a post-earnings call on Wednesday.
Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala cited an estimated jump of more than 35% in chip sales to Chinese smartphone-makers in and outside China for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023.
In late August, Huawei abruptly released its latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, said to be powered by a 5G processor under its Kirin line featuring 7-nanometer technology — an apparent breakthrough in its fight to overcome U.S. tech export restrictions.
China clears Ant Group to roll out AI services
China cleared Ant Group Co. Ltd., the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., to roll out products powered by its large-language AI model Bailing.
Bailing will apply to Ant Group’s services and help with innovation, vice president Xu Peng said Monday.
Chinese tech businesses including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. have joined startups Baichuan and Zhipu to release ChatGPT-like products, joining a global race to capitalize on the potential of generative AI. Ant Group, the owner of Alipay, can leverage the popularity of the mobile payment service to gain more data and insight into user habits.
The government approval dovetails with efforts at Alibaba. On Monday, the company’s commerce unit also pushed out a suite of tools including chatbots for small businesses trying to expand overseas.
AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee creates unicorn in eight months
A Chinese startup founded by computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee has become a unicorn in less than eight months on the strength of a new open-source AI model that outstrips Silicon Valley’s best, at least on certain metrics.
The company, 01.AI, has reached a valuation of more than $1 billion after a funding round that included Alibaba’s cloud unit, Lee said in an interview. The chief executive of venture firm Sinovation Ventures began assembling the team for 01.AI in March. The business was up and running in June.
On key metrics, the Beijing startup’s open-sourced, foundational large language model, Yi-34B, outperforms leading open-source models. Hugging Face, which runs leaderboards for the best-performing LLMs in various categories, posted evaluations over the weekend ranking the Chinese model first for what’s known as pre-trained base LLMs.