Su Zhen, the former head of Huawei's autopilot, left his post and was dismissed for making inappropriate remarks about Tesla

Image source: Visual China

Su Zhen, former president of Huawei Intelligent Driving, was recently rumored to be leaving. In this regard, Huawei responded to the media that Su Zhen had indeed left the Huawei car BU and thanked Su Zhen for his contribution to the car BU.

According to the data, Su Jing is a star executive who turned out to be a star executive in Huawei's autopilot debut, the former director of Huawei's intelligent car solution BU intelligent driving product department, and the head of Huawei's automatic driving product line.

He was dismissed for evaluating "Tesla self-driving killing"

In early July 2021, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, during a night talk forum, Su Zhen was asked about the safety status of autonomous driving. He cited the facts of Tesla's accident and gave his opinion.

He said that Tesla's accident rate in recent years is still quite high, and from the first person to "kill" the person who recently "killed", its accident type is very similar. As a new Huawei "net red" with Geng Zhi technology, Su Zhen used a more sharp killing word.

But Su Zhen also explained that the reason why this place uses this word may sound very serious, but logically, in fact, this is the case. He expanded: "When the machine enters human society and human symbiosis, the machine will definitely cause the accident rate, and the ugly point is 'killing', but we want to reduce its accident probability to the lowest possible." Probabilistically, this is something that can happen."

In Su Zhen's view, the fundamental reason for giving this view is that he believes that it is unrealistic for machines to completely replace human drivers. He believes that in the next hundred years, the IQ of machines will not exceed that of humans, and L5 level, that is, fully autonomous driving, will be difficult to achieve in this lifetime. Therefore, logically, there is no absolutely safe machine driver, and it will be a matter of probability that the relevant safety accident will be caused - the difference is only how much probability. In the landing application, this probability will occur in the user's gradual acceptance process.

After that, Su Zhen also gave a solution to the problem, on the one hand, the automatic driving ability of the landed mass production car must be infinitely close to L4, which can handle all scenarios as much as possible and as many extreme scenes as possible. On the other hand, the autonomous driving system should require the user to supervise the driving of the vehicle, and cannot completely delegate authority to the system. In fact, this idea is also the industry consensus of the current mass production of autonomous driving.

From the background facts of the speech, or the logic of the exposition, Su Jing's thinking is not a problem. However, there is something wrong with being too sensitive to the word "killing" in the business of friends in the industry.

Huawei responded at the time that Su Zhen made inappropriate remarks against Tesla when participating in external activities to talk about autonomous driving technology and safety, and Su Zhen had conducted a profound review of his personal inappropriate remarks, but in view of the adverse impact caused by his remarks, the company decided to dismiss Su Zhen from the position of director of the intelligent driving product department of the intelligent car solution BU, and Su Zhen himself will go to the strategic reserve team to receive training and distribution.

Huawei also stressed that Huawei respects the efforts and contributions of every participant in the industry in the field of autonomous driving, and hopes to work with the industry to promote the development of autonomous driving technology. But even at that time, there were many people who complained about Su Andi, believing that he should not be punished in this way.

Different from Yu Chengdong's "transcendence"

In 2021, Huawei has two major personnel changes.

First, in early January, Yu Chengdong, president of Huawei's former mobile phone division, was entrusted with the responsibility of taking over Huawei's consumer business, smart cars, and cloud services as the core business. According to insiders, after Yu Chengdong became CEO, the commercial organization and technical organization of the car BU were clearly separated, and the Huawei car BU architecture became more and more like the consumer business architecture model. The second is that Su Jing, president of Huawei's intelligent vehicle product line, was dismissed from her post for publicly slandering friends.

Su Zhen can be described as Yu Chengdong's right-hand man, who served as the chief architect of Huawei Terminal Company, and also developed chips in Huawei HiSilicon Semiconductor, and the famous Da Vinci AI architecture (the architecture of Kirin chip, AI running score won the world's first) was developed by him.

According to the internal employee evaluation quoted by Caijing, Su Zhen has a straight temper and a leadership style of "untamed" and "technology first". Choosing Su Zhen to lead the autonomous driving team, there are also views that Huawei is intentional.

After leading Huawei's automatic driving, Su Zhen's views and remarks have also repeatedly aroused heated discussion. On the eve of the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2021, as a spokesperson after Huawei's autopilot debut, Su Zhen said amazingly: "Huawei's automatic driving is absolutely first." ”

At that time, although it was criticized as "too crazy", there was also speculation that Huawei needed such a person to push the smart car business to the most concerned position. In fact, Huawei's automatic driving is indeed accompanied by Su Zhen's remarks, and the debut is a hot search. There is also Huawei's internal old man evaluation, he (Su Zhen) is very similar to the big mouth (Yu Chengdong) who just made mobile phones.

People who know Huawei know that when it comes to "no mouth", they have to talk about Yu Chengdong, whose nickname inside Huawei is "Yu Dazui". Classic quotes such as: "Three years of super Apple, five years of super three stars", "In China, Huawei has no competitors", "2K mobile phone screen is fooling people" and so on.

After all, when Huawei entered the terminal and opened a mobile phone, Yu Chengdong constantly refreshed his attention with such a style and hot remarks. In 2011, Yu Chengdong began to take over Huawei's mobile phone division and issued a military order to Ren Zhengfei: "Huawei's mobile phone has tripled in 1 year, and it has become the world's first in 3 years!" ”

In the first quarter of 2020, Huawei's mobile phones accounted for 21.4% of global smartphone shipments, surpassing Samsung and Apple, and ranking first in global smartphone shipments for the first time. However, the only regret is that it has been more than 5 years away from yu Chengdong's military order.

Perhaps the difference between Yu Chengdong and Su Jing is that Yu Chengdong is talking about more than his opponent. Today, Su Jing has left Huawei, and her whereabouts are currently unknown. In July 2021, there was news that it had joined Weilai Automobile, and Weilai responded at that time that "the news was untrue", and Su Zhen also denied it in the circle of friends.

(Titanium Media App editor Zhang Hongjin synthesized from Sina Technology, Phoenix Network, Finance, etc.)