Huawei Admits AI "Bubble"

A fascinating article from the Chinese government's Global Times: Huawei’s AI ambition to reshape industries.

While the Global Times talks about Huawei 'unveiling' their AI strategy, Huawei was showing this at IFSEC 2018, e.g., see our Huawei Software Defined Cameras.

However, the strangest, yet most honest, Huawei declaration was:

"Although there's a bubble in the industry, we still believe AI is the future trend, which is the reason behind our investment in the sector," said Xu Weiwen, Huawei's chief marketing officer, during the conference. [emphasis added]

From what we have tested of Dahua and Hikvsion's 'AI', the 'bubble' is real but to admit so publicly is a bit... different.

AI is certainly a future trend but why bet so heavily and focus so much current sales and marketing if AI is still a 'future trend'?

Understandably, the Chinese government has been pushing AI hard and it makes people excited at first, but if it is not ready, spending lots of money pushing it to customers now is going to wind up wasting that money and damaging these company's reputations.

For Dahua and Hikvision, AI has been viewed as the next big thing to save themselves from racing each other to the bottom. But their AI clearly works poorly and, as we observed at the US ASIS GSX show, both companies have now abandoned AI marketing in North America. On the other hand, outside North America, Dahua and Hikvision continue to push AI where they risk popping the bubble.