The AI computing center in Shanghai Photo: Courtesy of SenseTime
Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are working hard to upgrade powerful large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots, in an effort to stay ahead of the growing competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.
Tencent said it has fully upgraded and open-sourced its self-developed MixNet model, amid a battle by tech companies to develop ever-more advanced AI tools, according to Jiemian News on Tuesday.
The model will reportedly become the first Chinese native-language open-source model with so-called diffusion transformer architecture, a novel approach to generative modeling.
The release of Tencent’s LLM coincides with OpenAI’s new flagship model GPT-4o on Tuesday. GPT-4o is an LLM tool that can reason across audio, vision and text in real time.
According to the company’s statement, this new application has significant improvement in text in non-English languages, and it’s also much faster and 50 percent cheaper.
The new release comes one day ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference, where it’s expected to announce updates to its Gemini AI model, according to CNN.
The roll-out of the latest version of the ChatGPT AI chatbot indicates that OpenAI is under great pressure to commercialize its models, and it is working hard to prove its commercial value, Tian Feng, dean of the SenseTime Intelligence Industry Research Institute, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
As Chinese companies have been racing to launch AI large models to narrow the gap with OpenAI, it will deliver a wave of “AIGA innovation,” AI generates audio and sound perception, to China’s domestic LLMs and Agents ecosystem, Tian noted.
Technological advances are the most powerful weapons in the journey toward AI, and they are key to keeping one step ahead of the growing competition in the AI arms race, experts said.
Leading Chinese AI models are mainly developed by tech giants – 360 Group, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, experts said.
Baidu, SenseTime and AI start-ups such as Baichuan Intelligent Technology and Zhipu AI have released AI chatbots to the public. Chinese unicorns such as Moonshot AI and Minimax have developed their own chatbots, and this has provoked discussions about the commercialization prospects of China’s LLMs.
As of the end of 2023, there were more than 200 LLMs in China, more than 20 of which had been approved to provide services to the public, China Media Group reported.
More Chinese technology giants are fully embracing LLMs and training their own models. But aAdmitting that there is still a significant gap between domestic LLMs and those of their Western counterparts, Chinese experts said it’s important for Chinese start-ups to follow the latest global developments in order for China’s own GPTs to catch up.
Industry insiders said that Chinese companies need to make more technology breakthroughs and use the results of research and development, and apply all of these inputs to real-world scenarios.
The integration of AI into more widely used consumer products such as such as mobile assistants, car assistants, robots and Augmented Reality goggles, may make those companies’ technologies more widely and easily accessible.
