At an annual summit this Thursday, Chinese tech company Tencent is debuting its AI software "Hunyuan" for commercial purposes. Dowson Tong, the CEO of Tencent's cloud and smart industries group, informed CNBC's Emily Tan about this development in an exclusive chat. Additionally, the tech and gaming giant is set to roll out an AI chatbot as well, as per an online announcement.
Tencent is introducing its artificial intelligence model "Hunyuan" to business at an upcoming summit this Thursday, reported Dowson Tong, CEO of the cloud and smart industries group at Tencent, in an exclusive interview with CNBC prior to the event. Baidu's unveiling of various AI-based applications this past Tuesday, after encouragement from regulations, may have contributed to Tencent's decision. The firm has claimed it was running internal tests into Hunyuan for fintech and advertising. In addition, a chatbot developed by Tencent should debut on Thursday, according to the company's online post. Tong proceeded to tell CNBC that Tencent intends to incorporate Hunyuan with their existing products, which include WeChat – a popular messaging and payments platform in China – and the video conference app Tencent Meeting.
In the past few weeks, Baidu and various other Chinese companies have gotten the approval to make their AI-powered chatbots accessible to the public. These bots, which are similar to ChatGPT with the ability to converse in a fairly human-like manner in Chinese, have extra functions, such as the ability to convert text to images and video, thanks to plugins from Baidu's Ernie bot. Unfortunately, OpenAI's ChatGPT is not available in the country since the presentation of the new rules concerning generative artificial intelligence on August 15th. In response to inquiries concerning these rules, Tong emphasised how AI is such a fresh concept that its impact on society is not known yet.
He emphasized the importance of setting up guardrails so that the technology or services provided are of high enough quality that they do not propagate misinformation. Chinese officials stated that the "interim" rules that became effective last month will not be applicable to companies creating the AI technology unless the product is made available to the general public. This is a less strict approach than the one proposed in the draft in April, which indicated that the regulations would also affect research.
Beijing has showed that its backing for generative AI is more extensive than what was initially feared. However, Chinese businesses are still limited by the U.S.'s regulations on accessing developed semiconductors. The best versions of these sophisticated chips, called GPUs, can provide companies with the means to build up AI models. Upon being asked regarding the effects of U.S. curbs, Tong disclosed to CNBC, "The constraint that we're facing will impede the progress, the velocity of growth."
He stated that the current demand for computing power exceeds supply in China, and companies are trying to deal with this shortfall by "focusing on specific use cases, building models of the right size". He ultimately expressed hope that the availability of GPU compute will be more abundant in the near future, which would lead to a speed-up of these technologies.
Tencent is only one of the many Chinese companies- from startups to phone manufacturer Huawei- that have hastened to reveal AI products this year. In August, Alibaba declared it would open its AI model to third-party developers. According to Tong from Tencent, to get value out of artificial intelligence, it needs to be tailored to a particular industry. He named particular areas of use such as tourism, finance, public services and customer service. Tong went on to state that various customers would benefit from utilising open-source models and their own enterprise data to create their own models in order to satisfy the particular requirements for their industrial use cases. Furthermore, Tong mentioned that such designated usage could also be advantageous for data security.
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