Tencent releases AI model for businesses as competition in China heats up

Chinese tech big Tencent is launching its synthetic intelligence mannequin “Hunyuan” for business use at an annual summit on Thursday, Dowson Tong, CEO of the cloud and sensible industries group at Tencent, advised CNBC in an unique interview forward of the occasion.

The news comes days after Baidu revealed a slew of AI-powered functions on Tuesday within the wake of extra supportive regulation.

Tencent has mentioned it was internally testing its Hunyuan AI mannequin on promoting and fintech. The gaming and social media big can also be set to launch an AI chatbot on Thursday, the corporate mentioned in a web-based publish.

Tencent is integrating Hunyuan’s capabilities with its present merchandise for video conferencing and social media, Tong advised CNBC.

The firm operates WeChat, a extensively used messaging and funds app in China, and video convention platform Tencent Meeting.

Baidu and a number of other different Chinese corporations acquired the inexperienced mild in the previous few weeks to launch AI-powered chatbots to the general public.

Similar to ChatGPT, the bots purport to answer queries in a human-like, conversational style — however primarily in Chinese. Some, similar to Baidu’s Ernie bot, additionally convert textual content to pictures and video, with the assistance of plugins.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not formally accessible in China. The chatbot releases observe new Chinese regulation on generative AI that took impact Aug. 15.

When requested concerning the guidelines, Tong identified that such synthetic intelligence is so new that nobody is aware of what affect it’ll have on society.

“It’s prudent to put in some guardrails in place,” he mentioned. That will assist be certain that the expertise or the providers being supplied are of excessive sufficient high quality so they do not create and distribute false data, he mentioned.

Chinese authorities mentioned the “interim” guidelines that took impact final month wouldn’t apply to corporations creating the AI tech so long as the product was not accessible to the mass public.

That’s extra relaxed than a draft launched in April that mentioned forthcoming guidelines would apply even on the analysis stage.

While Beijing has proven it’s extra supportive of generative AI than initially feared, Chinese corporations additionally face U.S. restrictions on acquiring superior semiconductors. The most leading edge variations of the high-tech chips, generally known as graphics processing models (GPUs), enable corporations to coach AI fashions.

“The constraint that we’re facing will hinder the progress, the speed of development,” Tong advised CNBC in response to a query about U.S. restrictions.

He famous demand for computing energy total far exceeds provide in China. To mitigate the scarcity, he mentioned corporations are “focusing on specific use cases, building models of the appropriate size.”

“And we are hoping that the supply of the GPU compute will be larger in the coming months, and therefore the development of these technologies can get faster.”

Tencent is only one of many corporations in China — starting from startups to cellphone maker Huawei — which have rushed to announce AI merchandise this yr. In August, Alibaba introduced it was opening its personal AI mannequin to third-party builders.

Artificial intelligence requires industry-specific coaching for the expertise to generate worth, Tencent’s Tong mentioned. He listed business use instances in tourism, finance, public providers and customer support.

“We believe many different customers, in fact, would benefit more by leveraging open-source models and use their own enterprise data to train for their own models to meet the very specific needs in their industrial use cases,” he mentioned.

That designated use may also assist with knowledge safety, he mentioned.