AI “anxiety” swept across netizens and industries in China last month, when OpenAI, the United States company that developed the artificial intelligence-powered language model ChatGPT, launched Sora, a text-to-video model that allows users to create photorealistic videos based on prompts they’ve written. Why weren’t groundbreaking technologies such as Sora and ChatGPT created in China? How long will it be before China’s equivalent of Sora comes out? Is the AI gap between China and the U.S. widening? These were some of the questions being asked across the nation. While some people in China are concerned about falling behind the U.S. in frontier AI technologies, leading company executives and experts believe that China’s AI large language model has developed quicker than expected and has unique advantages over its U.S. counterpart. They did concede, however, that more joint efforts are needed to develop underlying AI technologies such as GPT-4 as well as computing power to close the gap with the U.S.
“There is no need to be overly anxious about the launch of Sora,” said Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of Chinese AI company iFlytek. “Sora is just a successful implementation of basic capabilities of GPT-4 in the video sector.” Liu said that the main focus of the current AI competition between the U.S. and China is still over the capability of the base of the AI large language model. “In terms of such a foundation, Chinese companies have the confidence to develop it quite well,” he said. Zhou Chengxiong, Researcher at the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said while most of the current breakthroughs in AI technology are emerging from U.S. companies, latecomers also have advantages. For instance, they have fewer risks and uncertainties during the progress in development. “In addition, Chinese companies have developed AI large models and related technologies in a profitable way over the past year and have already accumulated basic infrastructure and technologies needed to develop the equivalent of Sora and ChatGPT,” Zhou said. He added that, “China still has a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of the world in the application of AI technologies in the future.”
As of October, China had developed 254 AI large models with a parameter of at least a billion tokens each, according to the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission. Tokens are chunks of text that AI learns from, while a parameter is used for evaluating numeric data. From December to February, more than 10 A-share companies, including Wondershare, BroadV, Eclicktech and Hanvon Technology disclosed their investment and progress made in their text-to-video models. Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance and Huawei as well as thousands of startups are scrambling to develop AI large models.
iFlytek, based in Hefei, Anhui province, unveiled its SparkDesk AI large model in May. The company said in January that its upgraded version outperformed GPT-4 Turbo – the latest generation of ChatGPT – in metrics including language understanding and math. Its capability in multimodal understanding had reached 91% of that of OpenAI’s most advanced model. The company said that SparkDesk is expected to reach the level of GPT-4 Turbo “in an all-round way” in the first half of this year. Liu said Huawei Founder Ren Zhengfei had sent the company’s highest-level team to Hefei to work on co-development of the model. “Through continuous optimization of software and hardware like chips, the training efficiency has increased from 20% to 30% to the current 90%,” Liu said of the advances made in SparkDesk’s development.
Tencent Holdings debuted its AI large model, Hunyuan, in September. Hunyuan has so far been connected to more than 50 of Tencent’s products and services, such as WeChat search, cloud, advertising, gaming, financial technology, online meetings and documents. In June, Tencent Cloud, the company’s cloud subsidiary, also launched an industry-specific large model. Compared with general large models like ChatGPT, industry-specific large models are industrial versions of ChatGPT focused on niche sectors. Zhou Hongyi, Founder and Chairman of 360 Security Technology, said that 2024 should be the “year of application” for Chinese AI development. “If we can excel in a particular business domain by training a large model with unique business data – and integrate it with many business tools – it will not only have intelligence but also possess unique knowledge,” he said. “It is entirely possible for China to surpass its U.S. counterparts in a year or two.”
Zhou Yu, Chairman of Beijing Fanyu Technology Co, a startup specializing in natural language processing products and services, said Chinese and U.S. startups appear to be adopting different approaches to developing large models that drive generative AI. “The U.S. puts more emphasis on the research and development of underlying technology and groundbreaking innovations. The U.S. is a world leader in terms of hardware and deep-learning frameworks,” Zhou said. “China focuses more on applications, adapting technology to various industries, and commercializing different applications. Chinese companies are also more flexible in creating personalized products and innovations,” she added, as reported by the China Daily.
