Chinese tech companies aim to ramp up investments, enhance computing power, and collect more high-quality data.
Competition is intensifying in the rapidly evolving field of generative artificial intelligence (AI), a transformative technology expected to impact a wide range of sectors and drive a new wave of industrial transformation and upgrade, according to domain experts.
Experts suggest that Chinese technology firms should increase investments in enhancing computing power and algorithms, and amass high-quality training data, to gain a competitive edge in the global AI race and close the gap with the United States in this cutting-edge field.
Generative AI refers to computer algorithms trained on vast amounts of data, enabling them to create content such as images, text, audio, and video in a human-like manner. This technology is fundamental to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, developed by the US-based research firm.
The recent release of GPT-4o, the latest large language model (LLM) from OpenAI, has garnered global attention. This new generative AI model surpasses previous versions in visual and audio comprehension, making human-machine interactions more natural and intuitive.
LLMs are AI models that have been trained on extensive text data, enabling them to perform various tasks, including natural language processing and machine translation.
Industry experts believe that multimodal LLMs, which can process and generate content across multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video, will drive the future development of the generative AI industry. These models have significant potential applications in fields like finance, retail, healthcare, and intelligent manufacturing.
According to a report by global consultancy McKinsey & Co, generative AI is expected to add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in annual value to the global economy, benefiting all industry sectors. Banking, high technology, and life sciences are predicted to experience the most significant impact from generative AI.
Leading Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Baidu Inc, iFlytek, and Tencent Holdings Ltd, are racing to develop their own AI-powered LLMs and promote the commercial use of generative AI technology.
In May, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing division of Alibaba Group, introduced Tongyi Qianwen 2.5, the latest version of its LLM. The company claimed that this model’s capabilities have surpassed those of OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model, the predecessor to GPT-4o.
According to Alibaba, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 has undergone a comprehensive upgrade, with enhanced performance in reasoning, code comprehension, and textual understanding compared to its predecessor.
In terms of Chinese language processing, the new model has matched GPT-4 in text understanding and generation, knowledge quizzes, dialogues, and life advice, said Zhou Jingren, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba’s LLMs are being used by over 90,000 enterprise clients across various industries, including consumer electronics, automobiles, education, healthcare, culture, tourism, and gaming.
“We look forward to collaborating with our customers and developers to capitalize on the immense growth opportunities presented by the latest advancements in generative AI technology,” Zhou said, adding that Alibaba Cloud will continue to contribute a diverse array of AI models to open-source communities.
Official data indicates that Chinese self-developed LLMs rank second globally, with over 100 LLMs boasting more than 1 billion parameters each being launched in China.