AI Photo:VCG

 
Chinese firms including Huawei and Trip.com have launched AI models for industrial use amid the global ChatGPT frenzy, which is believed to be the latest frontier in the tech race between China and the US.

In the latest push, Shandong Energy Group (Shandong Energy), Huawei, and Yunding Technology jointly launched the Pangu Mine Model, the world's first commercial large AI model for the energy sector, aiming to enhance the application of AI in the mining industry and transform workshop-scale AI model development into factory-scale development.

As the pioneers of using large AI models in the energy sector, Shandong Energy, Yunding Technology and Huawei have been working on the first set of AI applications for mining. These were developed based on the pilot verification of large AI models in industrial production, Huawei said in a statement sent to the Global Times.

There are altogether 21 application scenarios related to nine operating activities - namely, coal mining, tunneling, primary transportation, auxiliary transportation, lifting, safety monitoring, rock burst prevention, coal preparation, and coking - the company said.

For example, rock bursts are a particularly challenging issue in mining. The primary means of preventing rock bursts is drilling destress holes, a process in which quality is important. Shandong Energy has managed to address this challenge in its Lilou and Xinjulong coal mines by deploying the large AI model. 

With its visual recognition capabilities, the model can intelligently analyze the quality of stress relief drilling, and assist rock burst prevention personnel in quality verification, reducing their review workload by 82 percent. It used to take three days to complete such checks; now the time has been shortened to 10 minutes, with a 100 percent acceptance rate.

"Huawei will continue to dive deep into industry transformation, and make the powerful capabilities of the Pangu Model available to a wider range of industries. We will enable partners and work with them to solve industry problems in specific scenarios, creating greater value," said Zou Zhilei, chairman of Huawei Mine BU. 

On July 7, Huawei launched a new AI model, Pangu 3.0, during the Huawei Developer Conference 2023 held in South China's Guangdong Province. Rather than being good at activities such as writing poems like other GPT models, Pangu will primarily focus on "empowering and reshaping various industries," the company said.

The name Pangu comes from ancient Chinese mythology and folklore. Pangu is a legendary figure associated with the creation of the world.

On Monday, online travel agency Trip.com held a press conference in Shanghai and officially launched its vertical large-scale model "Ctrip Wendao." According to Chairman James Liang Jiandao, Ctrip Wendao is the first vertical large-scale model developed by Ctrip in the tourism industry.

"We have invested a lot of manpower in generating and verifying the content of travel general responses. This can make the recommendation reliability we provide better than with the basic large model," Liang said, according to a statement the company sent to the Global Times.

In the past few months, a slew of Chinese companies have announced they are developing their own large language models, as the GPT craze spreads across the globe. These include firms such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, as well as universities and state-backed institutions.

At the national level, Huawei and companies including 360, Baidu, and Alibaba were appointed by the China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as the leading organizations for the National Artificial Intelligence Standardization General Group on Large-scale Models.

This appointment aims to actively promote the establishment of a national standard system for large-scale models.