Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba have touted artificial intelligence as a transformative technology on company earnings calls this week.
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As the hype surrounding the technology reaches dizzying heights, China’s tech giants are banking on AI to power their businesses, touting new features for their existing services and novel generative AI tools.
alibaba, Tencent and baiduOn company earnings calls this month, all of the companies collectively known as “BAT” spoke highly of generative artificial intelligence — a subset of artificial intelligence that deals with tools that can generate text, images and other content based on user prompts — Much praise.
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ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot backed by Microsoft known for its ability to carry out more human-like conversations, is a style of system that has attracted significant interest from investors and companies looking to integrate the technology or develop their own alternatives. There is fierce competition among companies.
In the case of Chinese companies, expect AI-generating tools to be more restricted in what users can or cannot say due to Beijing’s tight control over internet service in the country.
But the Chinese government has not chosen to terminate products like ChatGPT, even though ChatGPT itself remains inaccessible in the country. Instead, Beijing introduced new rules governing how companies develop such tools.
Without delay, China’s tech giants have used their greater openness to new technological innovations — in stark contrast to their approach to cryptocurrencies — to their advantage.
‘Pattern shift’
China’s tech giants last week outlined their belief that they see generative artificial intelligence as a technological revolution. “Generative AI is a huge opportunity for us. It can be compared to the introduction of the internet and smartphones,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call.
“To seize this opportunity, we leveraged our technical capabilities and our extensive experience in search, knowledge graphs and conversations,” he added.
What Baidu says is Awaiting regulatory approval for its Ernie Bot chatbot service, a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
On Wednesday, Tencent confirmed the existence of a so-called base model it is developing, called Hunyuan Aide. Base models are large AI programs trained on vast amounts of data so they can be adapted to solve a wide range of tasks.
Meanwhile, Tencent President Lau Chiping said the company was “making good progress” on the technology. “I think one of our key strengths is obviously use cases,” Liu said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “We have different product (and) teams already planning some interesting products…their products.”
Alibaba earlier this year developed its own ChatGPT-style generative artificial intelligence tool, Unified Qianwen, saying its system could help accelerate customer adoption of its cloud computing services. Up to now, Alibaba has a very strong demand for Tongyi Qianwen, and 200,000 corporate customers have applied for trial use.
“The development of artificial intelligence technology has brought huge new opportunities for the cloud business, because the application of artificial intelligence will lead to an exponential increase in the demand for computing power,” said the company’s CEO Zhang Yong in its fourth-quarter earnings conference call. above said.
“This computing power needs to be provided as a public service or infrastructure. So this is a huge opportunity for us.”
Zhang’s comments came as Alibaba announced plans to spin off its cloud computing unit as a separately listed entity.
The tech giants’ ambitions for artificial intelligence reflect an escalating global arms race now underway as countries seek to gain leadership in the technology. Microsoft and Googletwo of the largest technology companies, currently dominate the conversation around AI with their respective advanced language processing technologies.
Generative AI is seen as a “paradigm shift” for the tech industry, Dan Ives, managing director of equities at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC. Specifically, China “has some of the most advanced artificial intelligence technology in the world,” he added.
“We believe this is a Game of Thrones that is also playing out in the Chinese tech market, because the battle is ready,” Ives said.
“Tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are trying to put iron bars on their AI foundations. Many innovative suppliers are chasing this market, and Chinese tech is currently in the midst of a secular shift toward artificial intelligence.”
Comments from some of China’s top tech companies last week hint at how Beijing is seeking to step up competition with the United States in artificial intelligence.
However, there are concerns that a U.S. ban on Chinese companies buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment could hinder China’s progress in artificial intelligence.Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent do not produce their own chips, but rely on chipmakers such as Nvidia Get the processors you need for cloud computing operations.This makes them vulnerable to U.S. sanctions
Over the weekend, China banned domestic companies from buying equipment from U.S. chipmaker Micron in retaliation for U.S. sanctions.
“I think going forward, it’s clear that AI requires a lot of computing power, so if China continues to ban its AI industry from using this key technology, it’s hard to see how China can win the race,” said Hong Kong, chief economist at Hao Grow Investment Group. said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
For its part, Tencent said the chips are still “available in large quantities” and that there are “some workarounds” that allow it to continue to maintain access to the graphics processing units in China. These GPUs are used to power AI applications.
limited artificial intelligence
One thing that was clear from the Chinese tech giants’ earnings statements and last week’s conference calls is that they are aware of — and eager to comply with — the coming tightening of regulations on AI.
“We think the government’s general stance is pro-regulation — but the industry has to be regulated,” Tencent’s Liu said. “And I don’t think it’s a China-specific thing … If you look at the U.S., there’s a lot of public discussion about regulation.”
Baidu’s Li said the company “puts a lot of effort into technology and compliance development to ensure our products and services comply with applicable regulatory requirements.”
“For important and sensitive topics, we have to ensure that the AI does not hallucinate. Given that the LLM is more or less a probabilistic model, this task is not at all simple,” he added. LLMs are large language models, meaning advanced AI algorithms are trained on massive datasets to process, understand and generate human language.
“The requirements have not been finalized, so we have to keep updating our strategy as it evolves.”
it is followed by a China’s crackdown on its domestic tech companies has only started to subside after $1 trillion was wiped off the market value of the entire industry.
China has cracked down on some of its most valuable tech companies, from Alibaba and Tencent to Didi and Meituan, in a move that has been interpreted as keeping the companies in line and preventing them from abusing their market power.
watch: Could China’s ChatGPT clone give it the edge over the US in the AI arms race?
