HiAI Foundation: The Newest, Brightest Way to Develop AI Apps - Huawei Developers

Now, AI has been rolled-out in education, finance, logistics, retail, transportation, and healthcare, to fill niches based on user needs or production demands. As a developer, to stay ahead of the competition, you'll need to translate genius insights efficiently into AI-based apps.
HMS Core HiAI Foundation is designed to streamline development of new apps. It opens the innate hardware capabilities of the HiAI ecosystem and provides 300+ AI operators compatible with major models, allowing you to easily and quickly build AI apps.
HiAI Foundation offers premium computing environments that boast high performance and low power consumption to facilitate development, with solutions including device-cloud synergy, Model Zoo, automatic optimization toolkits, and Intellectual Property Cores (IP cores) that collaborate with each other.
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Five Cores of Efficient, Flexible Development​HiAI Foundation is home to cutting-edge tools and features that compliment any development strategy. Here are the five cores that facilitate flexible, low-cost AI development:
Device-cloud synergy: support for platform update and performance optimization with operators for new and typical scenarios
Because AI services and algorithm models are constantly evolving, it is difficult for AI computing platforms to keep up. HiAI Foundation is equipped with flexible computing frameworks and adaptive model structures that support synergy across device and cloud. This allows you to build and launch new models and services and enhance user experience.
Model Zoo: optimizes model structures to make better use of NPU (neural processing unit) based AI acceleration
During development, you may need to perform model adjustment on the underlying hardware structure to maximize computing power. Such adjustment can be costly in time and resources. Model Zoo provides NPU-friendly model structures, backbones, and operators to improve model structure and make better use of Kirin chip's NPU for AI acceleration.
Toolkit for lightweight models: make your apps smaller and run faster
32-bit models used for training provide high calculation precision, but equally consume a lot of power and memory. Our toolkit converts original models into smaller, more lightweight ones that are better suited to NPU, without comprising much on computing precision. This single adjustment helps save phone space and computing resources.
HiAI Foundation toolkit for lightweight models​Network architecture search (NAS) toolkit: simple and effective network design
HiAI Foundation provides a toolkit supporting multiple types of network architecture search, including classification, detection, and segmentation. With specific precision and performance requirements, the toolkit runs optimization algorithms to determine the most appropriate network architecture and performance based on the hardware information. It is compatible with mainstream training frameworks, including PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Caffe, and supports high computing power for multiple mainstream hardware platforms.
HiAI Foundation NAS toolkit​IP core collaboration: improved performance at reduced power with the DDR memory shared among computing units
HiAI Foundation ensures full collaboration between IP cores and open computing power for hardware. Now, IP cores (CPU, NPU, ISP, GPU) share the DDR memory, minimizing data copy and transfers across cores, for better performance at a lower power consumption.
HiAI Foundation connects smart services with underlying hardware capabilities. It is compatible with mainstream frameworks like MNN, TNN, MindSpore Lite, Paddle Lite, and KwaiNN, and can perform AI calculation in NPU, CPU, GPU, or DSP using the inference acceleration platform Foundation DDK and the heterogeneous computing platform Foundation HCL. It is the perfect framework to build the new-generation AI apps that run on devices like mobile phones, tablets, Vision devices, vehicles, and watches.
HiAI Foundation open architecture
Leading AI Standards with Daily Calls Exceeding 60 Billion​Nowadays, AI technologies, such as speech, facial, text, and image recognition, image segmentation, and image super-resolution, are common features of mobile devices. In fact, it has become the norm, with users expecting better AI apps. HiAI Foundation streamlines app development and reduces resource wastage, to help you focus on the design and implementation of innovative AI functions.
High performance, low power consumption, and ease of use are reasons why more and more developers are choosing HiAI Foundation. Since it moved to open source in 2018, the calls have increased from 1 million times/day to 60 billion/day, providing its worth in the global developer community.
Daily calls of HiAI Foundation exceed 60 billion​HiAI Foundation has joined the Artificial Intelligence Industry Technology Innovation Strategy Alliance, or AITISA, and takes part in drafting the device-side AI standards (currently under review). Through joint efforts to building industry standards, HiAI Foundation is committed to harnessing new technology for AI industry evolution.
Visit HUAWEI Developers to find out more about HiAI Foundation.