Photo: A screen shot of Zhong Zhao's photo on Huawei's online community Xinsheng

Chinese tech giant Huawei revealed for the first time the "mysterious" work of its young prodigy Zhong Zhao, a young employee with an annual salary of 2.01 million yuan ($314,435), whose technology has been applied to tens of millions of Huawei smart phones, according to an article released on Huawei's online community Xinsheng in November.

The article said that in less than a year after joining the company, Zhong and his team applied Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) technology to tens of millions of Huawei cell phones, achieving the first breakthrough in commercializing AutoML on a large scale.

Since then, Zhong has developed an end-to-end pixel-level AutoML pipeline, successfully reducing the complexity of the video photography prototype algorithm by a factor of 100.

Simply speaking, AutoML means designing artificial intelligence (AI) with AI. Before Zhong came to Huawei, the company was already researching related technology.

"From 2019 to 2021, our photo algorithm continues to achieve breakthroughs across a series of smart phones, in which the algorithm of AutoML has played an irreplaceable role," Zhong was quoted as saying in the article.

In 2019, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei launched the so-called "Geniuses" recruitment program to attract top talent in the six high-tech fields including AI, intelligent terminal, cloud and computing, as well as smart cars.

Huawei has been accelerating the recruitment of "geniuses" from around the world amid external pressures and an ongoing US government trade ban. In the past three years, the company has recruited 17 young prodigies.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said that the company will strive to attract more skilled talent from around the world during a crucial period for the company's "strategic survival and development" in a company internal memo dated August 2.

Global Times