Just attended Huawei Developer Conference 2026 in person. Huawei's "Doom Slayer，" Richard Yu （Yu Chengdong）， is back - this time taking over the LLM. He unveiled Huawei's new openPangu 2.0 model and was unusually candid about the shortcomings. Huawei short on its own compute. And Huawei badly needs AI talent： "We can't match internet companies on salary - the people building LLMs with us run on belief and conviction."

At Huawei， when Yu gets handed a business， it's because the fight is brutally hard. And he keeps winning - phones from scratch in 2011， the Seres car partnership in 2021. In June 2025， Pangu was alleged to be highly similar to Qwen-2.5， and the responsible exec left. Yu taking over means Huawei's models are behind and need to catch up fast.