China’s AI future and Huawei’s long game

Ask Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei for his take on AI in China and the mountain of difficulties facing his company, and you get surprising answers.

“I haven’t thought about it,” says Ren, in a Q&A with Chinese media outlet People’s Daily. “It’s useless to think about it.”

In a world obsessed with five-year plans and crisis management, his advice is almost jarring in its simplicity: “Don’t think about the difficulties. Just do it and move forward step by step.”

This isn’t just a personal mantra; it’s the blueprint for how Huawei is navigating a storm of international sanctions and blockades. It’s a quiet determination that ripples through all his answers.

When the conversation shifts to Huawei’s advanced Ascend AI chips, he is almost brutally honest. He doesn’t boast. In fact, he believes the hype has gotten ahead of reality.

“The United States has exaggerated Huawei’s achievements. Huawei is not that great yet,” he admits, noting that their best chips are still a generation behind.

So what do you do when you can’t buy the best tools? According to Ren, you get smarter with the ones you have. He explains that Huawei is leaning on its brilliance in software and mathematics to close the hardware gap in AI and beyond.

“We use mathematics to make up for physics,” he says, describing a strategy of using code and linking chips together in powerful clusters to achieve results that can compete with the very best. Ingenuity born from necessity.

This grounded perspective applies to people as much as it does to products. In an age of relentless corporate promotion, Ren is wary of the spotlight. “We are also under a lot of pressure when people praise us,” he reveals. “We will be more sober when people criticise us.”

He sees criticism of Huawei not as an attack, but as a gift from the people who actually use their products. It’s a sign of a healthy relationship. His focus remains unwavering: “Don’t care about praise or criticism, but care about whether you can do well.”

But the real heart of Ren’s vision, the idea that truly animates him, lies in something much deeper and slower than the next product cycle: basic scientific research. He speaks about it with the passion of a philosopher, arguing it is the very soul of progress.

“If we do not do basic research, we will have no roots,” he warns. “Even if the leaves are lush and flourishing, they will fall down when the wind blows.”

For Huawei, these are not just poetic words. They are backed by huge investment. Out of an annual R&D budget of 180 billion yuan (around $25 billion) a full third of it – 60 billion yuan (~$8.34 billion) – is poured into theoretical research. This is money spent without the expectation of an immediate return, a long-term bet on the power of human curiosity. It’s an investment in a future that may be decades away.

Looking toward that future, Ren sees AI as a monumental shift not just for Huawei but for humanity. He believes China is well-positioned for this new era, not just because of its technology, but because of its powerful infrastructure and, most importantly, its people.

Ren imagines a future where the real breakthroughs in AI won’t just come from programmers in tech giants like Huawei, but from experts in every field – doctors, engineers, and even miners – using AI to solve real-world problems.

His optimism is infectious. He recalls an op-ed by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman who departed China and published an article earlier this year with a title that requires no further explanation: ‘I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.’

Ren Zhengfei seems to be a leader who has found a sense of calm in the eye of the storm. His focus is not on the shifting political winds, but on the slow, steady work of building something with deep roots, ready for whatever the future holds. Step by patient step.

(Image credit: European Union under CC BY 4.0 license. Image cropped for effect.)

See also: Hugging Face partners with Groq for ultra-fast AI model inference

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