China has officially acknowledged the gap between them and the United States in terms of the generative artificial intelligence race, prompting the country's industry leaders to call for a focus on new development for both hardware and software.
At a panel discussion on generative AI on Wednesday at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan province, Liu Cong, the vice president of the Chinese AI company iFlytek, acknowledged that China's general perception was that it still had a way to go to catch up to the global leaders.
He added that the primary goal must be the achievement of independently owned and managed hardware and software, particularly in major language models, even though the nation has been rushing to catch up.
(Photo by Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images) SHANGHAI, CHINA—JUNE 18: Cutting-edge applications of Artificial Intelligence are on display at the Artificial Intelligence Pavilion of Zhangjiang Future Park during a state-organized media tour in Shanghai, China, on June 18, 2021.
LLMs use large-scale data sets, the deep-learning AI algorithms that power chatbots like ChatGPT, which can recognize, summarise, translate, predict, and create content.
The chairman of Anhui-based iFlytek, one of the leading Chinese companies with its chatbot, said in October that Chinese LLMs need to close a "real gap" between the company's software and its US competitor, but he expressed optimism that his company would be more competitive by the middle of the year.
As per CNBC, China is attempting to overtake OpenAI in a larger U.S. market despite entering the game late. Tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, and Amazon, as well as well-funded startups like Anthropic-which last week received a $2.7 billion funding infusion from Amazon-have altered the AI market.
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United States Clear AI Lead
The U.S. and China, its tech rivals, are perceived as being a part of this rapidly developing industry. Paul Triolo, the main technology policy advisor, and senior vice president for China at Dentons Global Advisors in Washington, D.C., claims that the top Chinese businesses are measuring their performance against ChatGPT, demonstrating how far behind the nation lies.
Currently, China is lagging in foundational models, which dominate in OpenAI and Google's Gemini. However, reports suggest that China is catching up by utilizing Meta's open-source, large-language model Llama 1, according to Triolo, who also stated that even if China is lagging, its competitors are improving on the American model.
A lot of the models from China are essentially forks of Llama, and most people agree that these forks lag behind the top US businesses, including OpenAI and its video-to-text model Sora, by one to two years, implying that China does possess the technological know-how to influence the AI competition in the coming years.
China's LLM Advances
Recent reports also state that Chinese IT behemoths like Tencent Holdings and Kuaishou Technology are developing and utilizing large language models that power upcoming AI technologies as the US-China tech rivalry heats up.
During the earnings season, top executives from significant Chinese tech companies shared their success stories. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Chinese IT enterprises have been attempting to catch up with global IT leaders since OpenAI debuted its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022.
The CEO and creator of Kuaishou, Cheng Yixiao, revealed KwaiYii LLM enhancements for the biggest operator of short-video platforms in China during a call following the company's profits. According to Cheng, KwaiYii has surpassed GPT-3.5 and is getting close to GPT-4 in several areas.
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(Photo: Tech Times)
