AI reconstructs the operating system, and Honor plays its first trump card in the fourth year of development

After three years of independence, Glory has entered its fourth year with a dual-first position in China’s market share and folding screen market share. The recent IPO rumors have attracted much attention. How will Glory’s fourth year go?

On January 10, Honor’s signal at the 2023 developer conference gave the industry a glimpse of its unusual fourth-year layout.

At the press conference, Honor officially unveiled the veil of the MagicOS 8.0 (Chinese name Magic OS 8.0) operating system. Together with it, there is not only the industry’s first human-machine interaction method based on intent recognition, but also the "Magic Big Model" 7 billion parameter end-side AI model developed by Honor. At the same time, Honor announced the launch of the "Hundred Models Ecological Plan" to provide access to China’s 100 models with Magic OS to create a smart service ecosystem based on intent interaction.

It is not difficult to see that the three cards handed over at the beginning of the fourth year of Honor all revolve around innovation, "rolling" its own industry with its AI innovation. Zhao Ming, CEO of Honor, said in a group interview after the press conference: "Honor firmly believes in the future-oriented operating system and human-machine interaction, and it is time to make a change." With AI enabled, a new era of human-machine interaction is coming.

Is mobile operating system ushering in a new path?

The importance of the operating system to mobile phone manufacturers is clearly reflected in the Apple mobile phone. A very important reason for many consumers to choose the Apple mobile phone is the advantage of iOS, and domestic mobile phone manufacturers have long recognized this. In the face of strong opponents, latecomers want to get a share of the pie, and it is difficult to achieve without eye-catching innovation. The release of Huawei Hongmeng is an attempt, and the glorious MagicOS has opened up another path.

So what is unique about Magic OS 8.0? It is reported that when Honor released Magic OS 8.0, it brought "new kernel" platform-level AI capabilities, fully taking over human-related factors, such as personal knowledge base, location and status, habits and portraits, etc., to help OS accurately identify user intentions, efficiently dispatch system services, and then drive the birth of a new paradigm of intelligent end point interaction – the industry’s first intent-based human-machine interaction (Intent-based UI, or IUI), bringing "guess what you think, understand what you need" intelligent experience.

The biggest advantage of this interaction is that it supports multi-modal input and output methods such as natural language, voice, pictures, gestures, and eye movement, which can intelligently identify user intentions, make efficient reasoning decisions, and actively provide personalized services that "understand you" to efficiently complete complex scene tasks.

On the Honor mobile phone, this interaction has an intuitive function called "any door". Users can long-press the text, pictures, files, videos and other elements of the interface where they are located, drag to the edge of the screen on the left and right sides, trigger the any door function, and then quickly flow to other applications and services. For example, when the public needs to take a taxi, iOS it takes about 10 seconds and 8 steps to take a taxi, but the glory of any door only needs to press and hold the text message content and drag to enter the taxi software to achieve a one-step taxi.

"All operating systems today revolve around machine-centricity, which was set by the iOS 17 years ago, and no one has imagined the next generation of operating systems." In the interview, Zhao Ming talked about the original intention of Magic OS to restructure the operating system with AI. "For Glory, it doesn’t matter if the underlying system is Android or other, it provides the greatest value, which is that Baidu and other partners can quickly access without developing applications based on the system alone."

Driven by AI technology, Honor wants to build a human-centric operating system, breaking the boundaries of the operating system, breaking the boundaries of the device, and even breaking any previous human-machine interaction norms. Zhao Ming said, "The intention of any door to identify human-machine interaction is the result of our new exploration of human-machine interaction in the AI era."

Can the big model on the side of the glory really achieve magic?

Since last year’s generative AI technology entered the public eye, thousands of industries have set off a technological storm about AI big models. Various big models have emerged one after another, and the "Hundred Models War" has become a topic of great interest in the industry for a time. For mobile phone manufacturers, to face the AI era, they must naturally integrate into it in order to take the initiative.

Unlike the way other mobile phone manufacturers use the cloud-side model to compress to the end-side, Honor still follows its own end-side AI technology development route. At the Magic OS 8.0 conference, Honor’s first end-side platform-level AI model, the Magic Model, was simultaneously unveiled, and it was launched on the Honor Magic6 series.

The Magic Big Model disassembles the capabilities of the Big Model into specific scenarios, bringing innovative functions such as "dialogue into a film" that supports natural language dialogue to complete video editing, "multimodal agenda" that can generate schedules in one step by dragging complex content to any door, and "gallery semantic search" that is the industry’s first semantic search video function.

"The combination of’big model + arbitrary door ‘is very interesting. When you drag a sentence to the arbitrary door, it understands your intention through the learning ability of the big model, and then gives instructions. This makes it clear that the application direction of the glory big model is intention interaction, and the commercialization path is clear." Industry insiders said.

It has to be pointed out that the current market has been flooded with various large models. Honor has given up the established plan route of the industry and developed a self-developed end-to-end large model. What is the "magic" behind attracting users?

Honor Magic OS tends to create a personalized intelligent experience. Compared with the cloud-side model, the end-side AI has more advantages in personal demand response and processing, but the development of Honor AI is not exclusive, and open innovation can better serve users. In this regard, Zhao Ming pointed out in an interview that the future magic model and the cloud-side model must cooperate with each other and cannot replace each other. "You can turn off ChatGPT at any time, but you will find that in your life, there are many conveniences that cannot be replaced by ChatGPT, Qianjou model, ERNIE Bot, etc. This is the value of the future end-side AI and Honor Magic OS development capabilities to consumers."

Will the new ecosystem of large-scale model services bring about a new chapter in AI?

It is worth noting that the evolution of Honor’s platform-level AI capabilities not only empowers the magic OS, but also hopes to work with partners to create a new stage and create a new ecosystem.

In fact, this is also the consistent concept of Glory. Previously, in response to the competition in the folding screen mobile phone market, Zhao Ming has expressed on many occasions that he hopes that friends and businesspeople will work together to develop and expand the market together.

This time in the field of AI, Honor also put forward a similar concept, announcing the official launch of the "Hundred Models Ecosystem Plan" – to promote the collaboration and cooperation between the end-side large model and the cloud large model. That is, based on the understanding of personal intentions based on the end-side large model, through the glory end-side central control, dismantling tasks, efficiently and securely connecting the cloud large model, fusing and scheduling atomized services, completing complex task scenarios across applications, and ensuring that personal information is not in the cloud, safeguarding privacy and security.

In Honor’s view, the scale of the future network model is one million, just like the current APP, Honor cannot redo all the vertical domain APPs by itself. In the interview, Zhao Ming described the blueprint of the Honor Baimo ecological plan with a metaphorical image: "In the positioning and strategic choice of the big model, Honor chose to make the soil fertile, and plant different flowers and plants on it, so that it can be diverse."

Baidu, the leading player in China’s AI big model, is sowing seeds on this soil. At the Honor Magic OS launch, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has become a strategic partner of the Honor Big Model ecosystem. "MagicOS is a mobile application ecosystem with great innovation vitality and influence. In the era of big models, it will provide developers with broader opportunities, provide users with an unprecedented intelligent experience, and continue to promote the development of the industry. Baidu Intelligent Cloud, as a strategic partner of the Honor Magic Big Model ecosystem, will continue to focus on the deep integration of the terminal and cloud models together with Glory to promote ecological prosperity."

According to Zhao Ming, this ecosystem is currently continuing to grow, and the cooperation between Honor and the cloud model will be based on consumer needs, and will not exclude any partner. "[Honor] will be consumer-centric, what consumers like and what they are used to, the Baimo ecosystem will be connected to these big models. Baidu Cloud is the first step in cooperation, and Autonavi, Hanglv’s Qianjuan big model, etc. will be slowly integrated into this plan." It can be seen that when the next AI era arrives, Honor will join hands with partners to create a new AI ecosystem and open a new chapter.

Overall, Honor, which has established a firm foothold in the Chinese market, has a lot of plans on the development path of the brand in the fourth year. From leading the industry to leading the industry, Honor has taken a solid step on the foundation of the system. In the next stage, Honor will join hands with AI China power to amaze the world with technological innovation and achieve "world glory".