China’s AI industry leaders have recently acknowledged the gap between their country and the US in the race for artificial intelligence. According to a report by SCMP, the industry leaders have called for a focus on both hardware and software development to catch up with the industry leaders.
During a recent discussion on creative AI in Hainan province, Vice President Liu Cong of the leading AI chatbot company iFlytek, headquartered in Anhui province, admitted that China’s general perception is that they still have a long way to go to catch up with the industry leaders. Cong added that China’s main goal is to achieve independently owned and managed hardware and software, especially in the large language models (LLMs) that are driving the development of chatbots.
China is trying to surpass OpenAI in a large market despite joining the game later. While tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have already transformed the AI market, AI technology companies from the US and China are considered part of a rapidly growing industry. China’s top businesses are reportedly measuring their performance against the best chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to see how far behind the country is.
China currently lags in platform models, which dominate OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Reports suggest that China uses a large language model based on Meta’s open-source Llama 1 code. However, most people agree that these offshoots lag behind the leading American enterprises, including OpenAI and the video-to-text model Sora, by one to two years.
Chinese IT giants such as Tencent Holdings and Kuaishou Technology are said to be developing and using LLMs to support upcoming AI technologies as the US-China technology competition heats up. Kuaishou CEO and creator Cheng Yixiao revealed KwaiYii LLM innovations for the largest short video platform operator in China in a company financial report. According to Cheng, KwaiYii has surpassed GPT-3.5 and is approaching GPT-4 in some areas.
