Tencent unveils ChatGPT rival in China amid persevering with US AI chip ban

by Jeremy

Chinese language expertise company Tencent unveiled its “Hunyuan” synthetic intelligence (AI) system, a multimodal giant language mannequin (LLM) just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, on the World Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on Sept. 7. 

Hunyuan marks Tencent’s entry into “foundational fashions,” so named for his or her growth as a framework upon which related AI APIs can run.

In line with a weblog publish from Tencent, Hunyuan is meant to operate as a complete suite of AI instruments:

“Tencent’s basis mannequin helps a big selection of capabilities spanning the creation of photographs, copywriting, textual content recognition, and customer support, to call just a few. These will probably be instrumental in key industries like finance, public providers, social media, e-commerce, transportation, video games, and lots of extra.”

The AI system has additionally been built-in into Tencent’s ecosystem of functions and providers with connectivity to Tencent Cloud, Tencent Advertising and marketing Options, Tencent Video games, Tencent fintech providers, Tencent Assembly, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search and QQ Browser.

The launch comes as relations between the US and China stay icy after the Biden administration signed off on an export ban on sure sorts of pc chips, together with {hardware} generally used to develop and practice AI methods, in October 2022.

In line with a latest report, the 2 administrations proceed to have interaction in diplomatic talks however haven’t made any headway towards establishing a timeline for ending the ban.

Tencent, for its half, says the launch of Hunyuan indicators that it’s “dedicated to open collaboration within the ecosystem, with home companies in the end benefiting from the corporate’s high-quality mannequin providers, whereas worldwide companies leverage Tencent to entry the Chinese language market.”

At present, ChatGPT isn’t out there in China. Although Hunyuan isn’t the primary LLM launched within the Chinese language market — as Cointelegraph reported, it follows scores of different fashions from the likes of Alibaba and Baidu — it could be essentially the most vital.

Associated: China’s Baidu and different tech corporations launch ChatGPT-like AI chatbots

Tencent Holdings is China’s greatest expertise firm. Its merchandise have a nationwide attain, and as a result of ubiquity of WeChat and its related apps, Hunyuan has the potential to permeate the home market in ways in which OpenAI and Microsoft may not be capable of imitate with ChatGPT within the West.

Hunyuan is supposedly comparable in energy and functionality to GPT3 (OpenAI’s core mannequin, circa 2022) in the case of uncooked numbers, as reported by Tencent. At 100 billion parameters and a pair of trillion tokens, the LLM takes its place as probably the most highly effective LLMs on the planet.

Nonetheless, it’s value noting that parameter and token counts aren’t essentially indicative of the capabilities of a multimodal AI system. Hunyuan has the good thing about being skilled on an enormous corpus of Chinese language language textual content. Theoretically talking, this could give it a bonus over fashions skilled totally on non-Chinese language texts in the case of operations within the Chinese language language surroundings.