Experts confident nation can close Sino-U.S. AI gap(2)

Steady progress

As of October, China had developed 254 AI large models with a parameter of at least a billion tokens each, according to a report released by the Beijing Municipal Science &Technology Commission. Tokens are chunks of text that AI learns from, while a parameter is used for evaluating numeric data.

From December to February, more than 10 A-share companies, including Wondershare, BroadV, Eclicktech and Hanvon Technology disclosed their investment and progress made in their text-to-video models.

Well aware of the opportunities, Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Baidu Inc, ByteDance and Huawei Technologies as well as thousands of startups are scrambling to develop AI large models. Many of them have gained momentum over the past year.

Liu's iFlytek, based in Hefei, Anhui province, unveiled its SparkDesk AI large model in May. The company said in January that its upgraded version outperformed GPT-4 Turbo — the latest generation of ChatGPT — in metrics including language understanding and math.

Its capability in multimodal understanding had reached 91 percent of that of OpenAI's most advanced model. The company said that SparkDesk is expected to reach the level of GPT-4 Turbo "in an all-around way" in the first half of this year.

Liu said Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei had sent the company's highest-level team to Hefei to work on co-development of the model.

"Through continuous optimization of software and hardware like chips, the training efficiency has increased from 20 to 30 percent to the current 90 percent," Liu said of the advances made in Spark-Desk's development.

Domestic tech giant Tencent Holdings debuted its AI large model, Hunyuan, in September. Hunyuan has so far been connected to more than 50 of Tencent's products and services, such as WeChat search, cloud, advertising, gaming, financial technology, online meetings and documents.

In June, Tencent Cloud, the company's cloud subsidiary, also launched an industry-specific large model. Compared with general large models like ChatGPT, industry-specific large models are industrial versions of ChatGPT focused on niche sectors.