Alibaba and Huawei set to debut generative AI chatbots

China's tech giants show, yet again, they're as much a slave to Silicon Valley fashion as anyone

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly ready to satisfy local demand for generative AI chatbots in coming weeks.

Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Chinese users have been eager to get their hands on the technology. Cities like Beijing have pledged to assist developers, while academia and private industry alike have made progress.

A university-developed ChatGPT analog crashed within a mere four hours under the weight of a crushing traffic surge. Meanwhile, private industry versions like Baidu's ERNIE have had their own troubles – including managing censorship and botching some requests.

Alibaba was reported by Chinese media IT Home to be launching a large-scale model on April 11 during its 2023 Cloud Summit in Beijing. An industry application model is planned to follow on the 18. Alibaba declined to confirm those dates.

Alibaba's research institute, DAMO Academy, is reportedly working to incorporate the large-scale model into its Tmall Genie – a smart speaker that is home to intelligent personal assistant AliGenie.

Reports have emerged that some netizens have tested early copies. Out of 15 questions, ten responses reportedly outperform competitors. Benchmarks for determining that result were not disclosed.

DAMO Academy has released multiple versions of its large language model since 2021. According to IT Home, Alibaba used 512 GPUs to train the first multimodal large model, M6, with a 10 billion parameter large model.

Alibaba's large language model official release will come just days after Huawei debuts its own generative AI service.

Huawei's chief AI scientist, Qi Tian, is scheduled to introduce "The Progress and Application of Pangu Large Scale Models" on April 8 at the AI Large-Scale Model Technology Summit held in Hangzhou. Pangu has been in development since at least 2020 and the model was released [VIDEO] in April 2021. ®

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