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 "There is no need to be overly anxious about the launch of Sora," said Liu Qingfeng, chairman of Chinese AI company iFlytek Co Ltd. "Sora is just a successful implementation of basic capabilities of GPT-4 in the video sector, in other words, the underlying competitiveness of such tech still lies in GPT-4."

Liu, who is also a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress, the nation's top legislature, said that the main focus of the current AI competition between the US and China is still over the capability of the base of the AI large model. "In terms of such a foundation, Chinese companies have the confidence to develop it quite well. It is impossible for the country to be left with a huge gap to the US in AI development," he said.

Zhou Chengxiong, a researcher from 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 US 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."

Steady progress

As of October, China had developed 254 AI large models with a parameter of at least a billion tokens each, according to a report released by 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.

Well aware of the opportunities, Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Baidu Inc, ByteDance and Huawei Technologies as well as thousands of startups are scrambling to develop AI large models. Many of them have gained momentum over the past year.

Liu's 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 percent 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-around 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 percent to the current 90 percent," Liu said of the advances made in Spark-Desk's development.

Domestic tech giant 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.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202403/21/WS65fb6c00a31082fc043bdd09.html 

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