NPC deputy Zhou Yunjie, who is also chairman of the Board and CEO of Haier Group, explains how smart home appliances can be in the AI era.
Freshly stunned by DeepSeek, people are now amazed by how intelligent their homes can be with smart home systems in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.
Three-Winged Bird HomeGPT, developed by leading Chinese home appliance manufacturer Haier, is China’s first large-scale model in the smart home sector. It can customize scenarios by integrating home appliances based on simple voice commands.
NPC deputy Zhou Yunjie, who is also chairman of the Board and CEO of Haier Group, speaks to the media at the Deputies' Corridor on March 5.
For example, a user says, “I want to watch the movie ‘Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child’ in the living room.” It will activate DeepSeek-integrated HomeGPT to make a comprehensive assessment of the living room layout, device placements and lighting parameters, and switch on the integrated home appliances required. It will also tell the user how long the film is and approximately when it will end.
Zhou Yunjie, chairman of the Haier Group Board and the CEO, says intelligent evolution of home appliances involves five stages: mechanical intelligence, control intelligence, data intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and environmental intelligence. Haier is now at the data intelligence stage.
The first two stages are about interconnection and interoperability between appliances, enabling users to remotely control devices. With further technological advancements, Zhou predicts that by 2030, appliances may achieve environmental interaction, for example automatically adjusting the air conditioning based on weather changes, integrating seamlessly with the surroundings to proactively deliver services.
This will create an integrated smart ecosystem where appliances, vehicles, and daily life merge into a unified intelligent living environment.
However, before the wonderful visions become reality, there are still a lot of challenges to overcome. During the ongoing third session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Zhou, also an NPC deputy, talked about them and how to address them.
He says in the smart home sector large language models (LLMs) are pivotal for driving the transformation of traditional smart appliances and the home furnishing industry. These models can catalyze globally leading consumer sectors like household service robots, thereby generating over RMB 10 trillion of new growth across upstream and downstream industrial chains.
Developing smart home LLMs require three foundational elements: computing power, algorithms, and data. To address the current challenges in these areas, Zhou made two key recommendations at the NPC: Cultivating a data collection industry to establish unified, diversified data sources for smart home LLMs; and developing national-level data simulation platforms and training environments.
He urged for increased government funding and policy incentives to support industry leaders in building full-scenario data simulation platforms and training environments. This would lead to training for high-quality vertical domain models, provide premium services across the industrial chain, and advance the deep integration of embodied intelligence technologies in smart home scenarios.
Such efforts would empower household service robots and foster the development of new quality productive forces.
Zhou says AI, as a strategic technology driving the new round of scientific revolution and industrial transformation, exhibits a strong “lead-goose effect.” But three major challenges are currently hindering the deep application of AI based on industrial LLMs: the dual bottleneck of data quality and corpus construction; dual challenge of scenario adaptation and model reliability; and misalignment between transformation entry points and discourse frameworks.
His proposal is to launch pilot initiatives for deep AI applications based on industrial LLMs to develop a series of standardized, reusable, and cost-effective solutions that align industrial models with scenario blueprints. These efforts would provide small and medium-sized enterprises with accessible, affordable, and high-quality AI services.
Haier has integrated AI with its entire industrial ecosystem, from product development to customer interaction. Maintaining its international leadership in global smart home technological innovations, Haier Smart Home bagged the top spot in the 2024 “Global Smart Home Invention Patent Ranking” by Chinese patent information analysis company incoPat – for the 12th consecutive year – with 5,582 public patent applications.
Haier has also led or participated in the formulation of 120 international standards, making it the enterprise with the highest involvement in international standard development and the largest number of international standardization experts in China’s home appliance industry.
