Huawei Technologies has unveiled the latest version of its proprietary operating system (OS), HarmonyOS 6, new artificial intelligence (AI) models and its CloudMatrix 384 AI rack architecture, as the Chinese technology giant accelerates efforts to build out its in-house software ecosystem in the face of ongoing US sanctions.
The company introduced a beta version of HarmonyOS 6 at its annual developer conference on Friday, highlighting new features such as AI agents. Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, said the update was now available to developers, but did not specify a launch date for consumers.
Huawei has installed HarmonyOS 5 on more than 40 device models, with over 8 million developers registered in its ecosystem and more than 30,000 apps and “atomic services” – mini programs that run without installation – now available, according to Yu. Still, he acknowledged that HarmonyOS trails Apple’s iOS and Google’s open-source Android in terms of global reach and app support.
“But the top 5,000 apps accounted for 99.9 per cent of consumer time spent” on Huawei devices, he said.
The company also announced the HarmonyOS Agent Framework, a toolkit that will allow developers to create AI agents – programs that can perform tasks on behalf of users – without the need to build or train foundation models. More than 50 AI agents, including those from Chinese microblogging platform Weibo and audio platform Ximalaya, would be available when HarmonyOS 6 launches publicly, according to Huawei.
Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, introduces the company’s laptop with a foldable screen running HarmonyOS on May 19. Photo: Weibo
In a further push into AI, Huawei unveiled its latest Pangu models, under version 5.5. The latest family of its AI models include a natural language processing model with 718 billion parameters and a computer vision model with 15 billion parameters. Parameters are a machine-learning term for variables present in an AI system during training.
