13 ms·

Huawei deactivates AI and cloud business group in restructuring

45 points by shirkey 5y ago

llampx 5y ago
I feel sad somehow. Huawei was the only company which was going toe-to-toe against Google and Apple in the AI space. I saw it in their phones, which were better than many others, and had even better computational photography than Pixels of the same generation, in my opinion. Combined with their chip design expertise - they were making chips that were as good or better than the Snapdragons, its clear why the US needed them kneecapped. We as consumers lose when competition is stifled.
- zeb88 5y ago
  The issue is that it's a government owned entity, one that's totalitarian, genocidal and their technologies are largely stolen.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    The grandparent was alleging that their photo tech was better than Google’s. So from whom did they steal it from?
    - iamgopal 5y ago
      They were stealing the talent.
      - Daho0n 5y ago
        You can't steal people. You can kidnap people and you can hire people. Maybe if you kill them you can steal the body? You sound like an anti-piracy advertisement. "Piracy is theft".
        dgellow 5y ago
        Just to nitpick, because we are on HN: I remember a story of a cartel in Latin America kidnapping networking experts to force them to develop their technology stack. That may count as "stealing" talents? Not sure if that's what I remember, but here is a Wired article: https://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/ https://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/ Edit: of course I'm not implying that Huawei does this...
        tester34 5y ago
        "steal" is other way of saying "hired" because it feels kinda differently when you want to buy $competitor's top people
        Daho0n 5y ago
        You can only "buy" top people if your offer is better though. I see nothing wrong in people switching jobs for a better offer. Calling it stealing makes it sound as A Bad Thing while in truth it is a good thing for the person getting hired. If businesses shared the profits equally this wouldn't happen but then we are not in capitalism anymore..
      - dgellow 5y ago
        You mean, paying them well?
        novium 5y ago
        You could make the case that "stealing" talent is in terms of targeting hiring people where the training and research costs were footed by someone else. Then again, as you pointed out, you could also make the case that they weren't properly compensated.
        ansgri 5y ago
        In Moscow, major Asian companies like Samsung, Huawei, LG all have research centers where they hire some of the best science students from top universities, in particular by organizing joint study programs. This seems to be a widespread practice around the world for them, and actually profitable for both students and universities.
        throwawaybbqed 5y ago
        Interesting observation about Moscow having a lot of research labs. I never thought to wonder why Moscow had so many but this is an interesting point. What do you mean by join study program? Can you explain? Also, is there anything that stops top talent from moving to Silicon Valley (or some place else?) after they finish school?
        ansgri 5y ago
        Many top universities here are not like self-contained research universities of the West — they mostly deal with education, and research is conducted at non-educational academic institutions. So, for their Masters work, and maybe earlier, students do research in various organizations that have contracts with university. These are either academic institutions or commercial research departments or tech companies like Yandex. As for SV, it’s not that simple, it seems — most emigrants that I know either got job at something like Swiss Google after building a solid resume here or got into some academic program (PhD or postdoc) abroad.
    - raverbashing 5y ago
      It would be an interesting conversation to try and understand why/how are they better. Is it the sensors? The software? The lenses? In which conditions? In that specific case I think they probably had better ideas than Google?
  - krageon 5y ago
    > government > totalitarian, genocidal These go together anywhere on earth, so the main point you're making is about stuff being stolen. Even if it were true (which is very much not a given), who cares? Lots of good stuff was stolen and changed a little. Turns out sometimes things get better when you do that, it's a time-honored human tradition.
    - cyrksoft 5y ago
      So, in your view, every government in the world is totalitarian and genocidal? How can you compare the Chinese government, a dictatorship, with most democratic governments from western countries? Of course some governments do bad things, but tell me something genocidal the US government or Canadian government or any EU country is currently doing. There is no logical way to compare the Chinese government with any other government from the west. People in China aren’t free and can’t do anything unless the CCP dictators let them. Imagine insulting the CCP leaders the way everybody does in television in the US to their own government. You’d had the military involved and everybody would disappear and get ‘re-educated’ or murdered. And, btw, I don’t think the Chinese steal, I think they mostly copy.
      - Ceezy 5y ago
        Slavery /native american genocide, Philippine colonisation, no reason whatsoever to attack Iraq...
        cyrksoft 5y ago
        Except for recent and pointless wars (mostly US here) you mention things that are more than 100 years old... China does all those things today. Your point makes no sense whatsoever.
        Ceezy 5y ago
        US is still in Irak now... It's really not hard to find where the US is military active. The US jail population is 2 M, China, 1.5 M. It's little stuff like this that make the US look worse than China. Be sure that once China is finished killing Uyghur they will say that's an old story like ... hum ... the US. So yeah continue justify crimes, just remember one day, it could be your turn.
  - Ceezy 5y ago
    So you mean that the US is not genocidal country and didn't still their technology from Europe?
    - yhoneycomb 5y ago
      You're 100% right, but people on hacker news are so Murica-centric that they'll downvote the truth to oblivion. I would guess that at least 70% of people on here voted for Trump. Say anything negative about China and you get instantly upvoted. Anything positive about China or even slightly negative about the US and you get downvoted.
  - severino 5y ago
    That may be an issue for you. For me (and for most people) it wasn't when I bought my Moto G or my current iPhone.
  - rurban 5y ago
    On hand a rising communist regime dominating the markets, on the other an aggressive, genocidal, fascist regime, which once dominated the markets. Both backdooring their devices for global mass surveillance.
- ansgri 5y ago
  From what I can tell, It’s just restructuring, and basically undoing a questionable prior organizational division at that. They have a lot of research centers around the world and don’t seem to slow down their AI efforts at all.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  > they were making chips that were as good or better than the Snapdragons Which ones? And how were they better?
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    In general better bang for the buck; though a bit hard to see as they used exclusively in Huawei phones. The Huawei P30 pro e.g. was a flagship model sold for considerable less than the corresponding Samsung or Apple phones in Europe. No doubt in my mind that had it not been for the sanctions Huawei would be the top selling mobile phone brand even eating into Apple's highend market. This page lists some of the chips made Huawei: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon There are some rumours that Samsung will start to manufacture their chips but the most interesting stuff will happen when mainland Chinese fabs become good enough at highend manufacturing. Then China will probably return the favour and start to ban American chips from the Chinese market.
  - bgee 5y ago
    "The Snapdragon 888 wins in terms of CPU performance while the Kirin 9000 seems to be the one with the better GPU and AI capabilities. However, there are other factors to consider such as power efficiency where the Kirin 9000 already does excellently well as shown in our review video. So until there is an in-depth device-to-device comparison, we can’t say which chipset is the clear winner." [0] [0]https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/chip-battle-snapdragon-888-versus-kirin-9000/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/chip-battle-snapdragon...
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Going by this logic, why doesn't the US kneecap European, South Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese companies that are competitive with US companies in those industries? They key difference (outside of China being more adversarial in general) is that Chinese companies like Huawei blatantly steal IP from companies in those countries to make their tech. Also, Huawei is essentially an arm of China's intelligence apparatus, so keeping them at a far distance from other counties' infrastructure is generally a good idea. This isn't a protectionist thing, it's a corporate espionage and national security thing.
  - dragonelite 5y ago
    Just because a company is located in Europe, south Korea, japan etc doesn't mean its a European, south Korean, Japanese etc company. Look into their supply lines you will find that the core components are most likely US made so they have those companies by their balls. Or look into ownership breakdown might be that big US finance pretty much owns the companies voting wise. Took ASML the core component the light source is a US product, with out that product ASML can't produce their EUV devices.
    - KoftaBob 5y ago
      Interesting, where can I read about this light source that’s a US-made product?
      - dragonelite 5y ago
        In 2012 ASML took over the San Diego based CYMER which creates the light source for ASML EUV machines.
      - deepnotderp 5y ago
        Cymer in San Diego, acquired by ASML but still based in the states
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Huawei's offerings aren't competition, they are Advanced Persistent Threats from a Western-centric infosec perspective. Nothing of value was lost, once security is priced into the solution.
DebtDeflation 5y ago
>Huawei Cloud became China's second-largest cloud services provider in the fourth quarter of 2020, growing its Chinese market share to 17.4%, according to data from research company Canalys. This marked a sharp contrast to the fourth quarter of 2019, when Huawei Cloud was not in the top three. They entered a market dominated by 3 players (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu) and went from not even on the list to 2nd place with 17.4% share over the course of 1 year, and this is deemed a failure? This is equivalent to a new player entering the US cloud market, leapfrogging GCP and Azure in a year, and then deciding to exit the business because they haven't caught up to AWS yet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonelite 5y ago
  seems like they are stream lining the departments. >Caixin reported an internal memo revealed Huawei’s server and storage products unit will become part of the Internet Products and Solutions Department, which will be renamed ICT Product Solution and handle product R&D. For the rest I know too little about Chinese cloud offerings etc.
- throw4738 5y ago
  Did they made any profit? Was there some path towards profitability? 》 revenue generated by Huawei Cloud grew 168% year on year.
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
just turned them into cyber espionage groups

45 points by shirkey 5y ago

I feel sad somehow. Huawei was the only company which was going toe-to-toe against Google and Apple in the AI space. I saw it in their phones, which were better than many others, and had even better computational photography than Pixels of the same generation, in my opinion. Combined with their chip design expertise - they were making chips that were as good or better than the Snapdragons, its clear why the US needed them kneecapped. We as consumers lose when competition is stifled.

zeb88 5y ago
The issue is that it's a government owned entity, one that's totalitarian, genocidal and their technologies are largely stolen.
- chrischen 5y ago
  The grandparent was alleging that their photo tech was better than Google’s. So from whom did they steal it from?
  - iamgopal 5y ago
    They were stealing the talent.
    - Daho0n 5y ago
      You can't steal people. You can kidnap people and you can hire people. Maybe if you kill them you can steal the body? You sound like an anti-piracy advertisement. "Piracy is theft".
      - dgellow 5y ago
        Just to nitpick, because we are on HN: I remember a story of a cartel in Latin America kidnapping networking experts to force them to develop their technology stack. That may count as "stealing" talents? Not sure if that's what I remember, but here is a Wired article: https://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/ https://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/ Edit: of course I'm not implying that Huawei does this...
      - tester34 5y ago
        "steal" is other way of saying "hired" because it feels kinda differently when you want to buy $competitor's top people
        Daho0n 5y ago
        You can only "buy" top people if your offer is better though. I see nothing wrong in people switching jobs for a better offer. Calling it stealing makes it sound as A Bad Thing while in truth it is a good thing for the person getting hired. If businesses shared the profits equally this wouldn't happen but then we are not in capitalism anymore..
    - dgellow 5y ago
      You mean, paying them well?
      - novium 5y ago
        You could make the case that "stealing" talent is in terms of targeting hiring people where the training and research costs were footed by someone else. Then again, as you pointed out, you could also make the case that they weren't properly compensated.
        ansgri 5y ago
        In Moscow, major Asian companies like Samsung, Huawei, LG all have research centers where they hire some of the best science students from top universities, in particular by organizing joint study programs. This seems to be a widespread practice around the world for them, and actually profitable for both students and universities.
        throwawaybbqed 5y ago
        Interesting observation about Moscow having a lot of research labs. I never thought to wonder why Moscow had so many but this is an interesting point. What do you mean by join study program? Can you explain? Also, is there anything that stops top talent from moving to Silicon Valley (or some place else?) after they finish school?
        ansgri 5y ago
        Many top universities here are not like self-contained research universities of the West — they mostly deal with education, and research is conducted at non-educational academic institutions. So, for their Masters work, and maybe earlier, students do research in various organizations that have contracts with university. These are either academic institutions or commercial research departments or tech companies like Yandex. As for SV, it’s not that simple, it seems — most emigrants that I know either got job at something like Swiss Google after building a solid resume here or got into some academic program (PhD or postdoc) abroad.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    It would be an interesting conversation to try and understand why/how are they better. Is it the sensors? The software? The lenses? In which conditions? In that specific case I think they probably had better ideas than Google?
- krageon 5y ago
  > government > totalitarian, genocidal These go together anywhere on earth, so the main point you're making is about stuff being stolen. Even if it were true (which is very much not a given), who cares? Lots of good stuff was stolen and changed a little. Turns out sometimes things get better when you do that, it's a time-honored human tradition.
  - cyrksoft 5y ago
    So, in your view, every government in the world is totalitarian and genocidal? How can you compare the Chinese government, a dictatorship, with most democratic governments from western countries? Of course some governments do bad things, but tell me something genocidal the US government or Canadian government or any EU country is currently doing. There is no logical way to compare the Chinese government with any other government from the west. People in China aren’t free and can’t do anything unless the CCP dictators let them. Imagine insulting the CCP leaders the way everybody does in television in the US to their own government. You’d had the military involved and everybody would disappear and get ‘re-educated’ or murdered. And, btw, I don’t think the Chinese steal, I think they mostly copy.
    - Ceezy 5y ago
      Slavery /native american genocide, Philippine colonisation, no reason whatsoever to attack Iraq...
      - cyrksoft 5y ago
        Except for recent and pointless wars (mostly US here) you mention things that are more than 100 years old... China does all those things today. Your point makes no sense whatsoever.
        Ceezy 5y ago
        US is still in Irak now... It's really not hard to find where the US is military active. The US jail population is 2 M, China, 1.5 M. It's little stuff like this that make the US look worse than China. Be sure that once China is finished killing Uyghur they will say that's an old story like ... hum ... the US. So yeah continue justify crimes, just remember one day, it could be your turn.
- Ceezy 5y ago
  So you mean that the US is not genocidal country and didn't still their technology from Europe?
  - yhoneycomb 5y ago
    You're 100% right, but people on hacker news are so Murica-centric that they'll downvote the truth to oblivion. I would guess that at least 70% of people on here voted for Trump. Say anything negative about China and you get instantly upvoted. Anything positive about China or even slightly negative about the US and you get downvoted.
- severino 5y ago
  That may be an issue for you. For me (and for most people) it wasn't when I bought my Moto G or my current iPhone.
- rurban 5y ago
  On hand a rising communist regime dominating the markets, on the other an aggressive, genocidal, fascist regime, which once dominated the markets. Both backdooring their devices for global mass surveillance.
ansgri 5y ago
From what I can tell, It’s just restructuring, and basically undoing a questionable prior organizational division at that. They have a lot of research centers around the world and don’t seem to slow down their AI efforts at all.
ChemSpider 5y ago
> they were making chips that were as good or better than the Snapdragons Which ones? And how were they better?
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  In general better bang for the buck; though a bit hard to see as they used exclusively in Huawei phones. The Huawei P30 pro e.g. was a flagship model sold for considerable less than the corresponding Samsung or Apple phones in Europe. No doubt in my mind that had it not been for the sanctions Huawei would be the top selling mobile phone brand even eating into Apple's highend market. This page lists some of the chips made Huawei: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon There are some rumours that Samsung will start to manufacture their chips but the most interesting stuff will happen when mainland Chinese fabs become good enough at highend manufacturing. Then China will probably return the favour and start to ban American chips from the Chinese market.
- bgee 5y ago
  "The Snapdragon 888 wins in terms of CPU performance while the Kirin 9000 seems to be the one with the better GPU and AI capabilities. However, there are other factors to consider such as power efficiency where the Kirin 9000 already does excellently well as shown in our review video. So until there is an in-depth device-to-device comparison, we can’t say which chipset is the clear winner." [0] [0]https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/chip-battle-snapdragon-888-versus-kirin-9000/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/chip-battle-snapdragon...
KoftaBob 5y ago
Going by this logic, why doesn't the US kneecap European, South Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese companies that are competitive with US companies in those industries? They key difference (outside of China being more adversarial in general) is that Chinese companies like Huawei blatantly steal IP from companies in those countries to make their tech. Also, Huawei is essentially an arm of China's intelligence apparatus, so keeping them at a far distance from other counties' infrastructure is generally a good idea. This isn't a protectionist thing, it's a corporate espionage and national security thing.
- dragonelite 5y ago
  Just because a company is located in Europe, south Korea, japan etc doesn't mean its a European, south Korean, Japanese etc company. Look into their supply lines you will find that the core components are most likely US made so they have those companies by their balls. Or look into ownership breakdown might be that big US finance pretty much owns the companies voting wise. Took ASML the core component the light source is a US product, with out that product ASML can't produce their EUV devices.
  - KoftaBob 5y ago
    Interesting, where can I read about this light source that’s a US-made product?
    - dragonelite 5y ago
      In 2012 ASML took over the San Diego based CYMER which creates the light source for ASML EUV machines.
    - deepnotderp 5y ago
      Cymer in San Diego, acquired by ASML but still based in the states
selfhoster11 5y ago
Huawei's offerings aren't competition, they are Advanced Persistent Threats from a Western-centric infosec perspective. Nothing of value was lost, once security is priced into the solution.

DebtDeflation 5y ago

>Huawei Cloud became China's second-largest cloud services provider in the fourth quarter of 2020, growing its Chinese market share to 17.4%, according to data from research company Canalys. This marked a sharp contrast to the fourth quarter of 2019, when Huawei Cloud was not in the top three. They entered a market dominated by 3 players (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu) and went from not even on the list to 2nd place with 17.4% share over the course of 1 year, and this is deemed a failure? This is equivalent to a new player entering the US cloud market, leapfrogging GCP and Azure in a year, and then deciding to exit the business because they haven't caught up to AWS yet.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dragonelite 5y ago
seems like they are stream lining the departments. >Caixin reported an internal memo revealed Huawei’s server and storage products unit will become part of the Internet Products and Solutions Department, which will be renamed ICT Product Solution and handle product R&D. For the rest I know too little about Chinese cloud offerings etc.
throw4738 5y ago
Did they made any profit? Was there some path towards profitability? 》 revenue generated by Huawei Cloud grew 168% year on year.

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

just turned them into cyber espionage groups