AI Photo:VCG

 
As the 2023 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit starts on Wednesday, industry observers bet generative artificial intelligence (AI) will be a heated topic during the event as a global frenzy for the pace-setting new technology has persisted, ignited by the popular ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.

The latest development in the domestic generative AI sector came as AI start-up Lingyi Wanwu launched its first pre-trained large model Yi-34B on Tuesday.
 
"We have assembled a team with great potential that can compete with industry leaders like OpenAI and Google. After nearly half a year of accumulation and development at a steady pace, we have achieved remarkable results that are highly competitive compared to international level," said Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent venture capitalist who led the establishment of the AI start-up based in Beijing.

Lingyi Wanwu's latest funding, led by Alibaba Cloud, has put the start-up's valuation at more than $1 billion, making it a unicorn, according to a report by industry media outlet PEdaily.

The newly launched large language model (LLM), which is open source, will have the longest context window in the world. It can handle the input of extremely long texts with approximately 400,000 Chinese characters. In comparison, OpenAI's GPT-4 can process about 25,000 words.

Since the start of the year, a growing number of tech firms as well as start-ups in China have been doubling down on LLMs, believing it's a historic opportunity for the next-generation technology.

Chinese search engine Baidu was the first Chinese tech firm to debut an AI product to rival ChatGPT when it unveiled its language AI Ernie Bot in March. In April, Alibaba launched its LLM called Tongyi Qianwen, which allows AI content generation in both English and Chinese.

The biggest opportunity that AI 2.0 brings to change the world could be platforms and technologies, just like Microsoft Office in the personal computer era, and WeChat, Douyin and Meituan in the mobile internet era. Consumer-oriented applications will have the highest probability of explosive growth in commercialization, said Lee.

While Chinese players are ramping up efforts on the research and development of LLMs, US companies across the Pacific are accelerating pace as part of the global race for AI supremacy.

Elon Musk's new AI venture xAI launched its first AI chatbot technology named Grok over the weekend.

Despite heated competition, ChatGPT is still leading the trend. 

About 100 million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Monday, adding more than 2 million developers use the platform, including 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

China and the US are the two major forces in the world in the generative AI sector, accounting for more than 80 percent of the world's LLMs. The US as the first mover is leading the race, while China is rapidly catching up, Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based tech analyst, told the Global Times.

"China has apparent advantages in core application scenarios, which is crucial for implementation of any cutting-edge technology," Liu said, adding that Chinese firms should ramp up efforts to improve computing power, algorithms and data quality.

China has led a surge of global investment in the generative AI sector. In the first half of the year, China had 22 generative AI start-ups that received funding, while the US had 21 and the UK had four, according to a report by Zhidongxi, an AI-focused research firm in China. 

Global Times