(Bloomberg) — Huawei Technologies Co.’s secretive AI research lab has pushed back against accusations it relied on rivals’ models to develop its own Pangu platform, taking the unusual step of rebutting claims about its artificial intelligence efforts.
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The Pangu Pro MoE is the world’s first model of its kind to be trained on Ascend chips — Huawei’s answer to Nvidia Corp.’s AI accelerators — the lab said in a WeChat post over the weekend. While the company employed open-source code — as is “common practice” — Huawei said it respected intellectual property and stuck closely to licensing terms. This followed accusations posted on the coding platform Github that Pangu’s source code contained uncredited material from key rivals.
Huawei’s response is rare for a company regarded as a standard-bearer for China’s efforts to wean itself off foreign technology, in spheres from smartphones to semiconductors. In AI services, however, rivals such as DeepSeek and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have captured investors’ and industry executives’ attention.
“We strictly adhere to the requirements of open-source licenses, and clearly mark copyright statements in the relevant source files,” Noah’s Ark, Huawei’s research lab, said in the post. “We welcome and look forward to in-depth and professional discussions on technical details with everyone in the open-source community.”
A Huawei representative declined to comment beyond the statement issued by Noah’s Ark.
Founded in 2012 to spearhead research into advanced technologies at Huawei, Noah’s Ark now mainly focuses on cutting-edge AI and areas such as data mining. Its offices span Shenzhen to Hong Kong and London.
The accusations center around the Pangu Pro MoE (Mixture of Exerts) model. The company published its source code last week, which in turn spurred the creation of a GitHub group called “HonestAGI” that debated its origins. The post was deleted days later.
But on Sunday, another lengthy post appeared on the same platform. Entitled “Pangu’s Sorrow,” the unidentified author revived the allegations and also went into detail about how the team came under immense pressure to deliver, yet fell behind rivals.
–With assistance from Newley Purnell, Luz Ding, Jessica Sui and Vlad Savov.