What Are China’s Top AI Models?

Baidu’s Ernie 4.0

Chinese tech giant Baidu, which holds the largest share of the country’s search engine market, announced the latest version of its AI model, Ernie 4.0, in October. Ernie 4.0, Baidu chief executive Robin Li said, can comprehend complex questions and use reason and logic to generate responses. “It is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4,” Li said, according to the Associated Press.

Ernie Bot was first released last March, and could “interact in dialogue, create content, reason with knowledge, and generate multiple modes of output,” according to Baidu. Ernie Bot is built on Baidu’s ERNIE large language model (LLM), which has been in development since 2019.

Alibaba’s Qwen 2

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group, released its latest large language model (LLM) series, Qwen 2, in June, and said it “topped rankings for open-sourced LLMs.”

The Qwen 2 series outperformed other leading models in 15 benchmarks, including language comprehension, coding, and reasoning, Alibaba said. The models were trained on 29 languages, including German and Arabic, and also outperformed for multilingual capabilities.

Tencent’s Hunyuan

Chinese internet and tech company Tencent unveiled its proprietary foundation model, Hunyuan, in September, which it said could generate images and text, among other functions. Hunyuan was made available to enterprises to test and build apps off of. The foundation model has “strong Chinese language processing abilities, advanced logical reasoning, and comes with reliable task execution abilities,” Tencent said.

Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, reportedly had a hand in launching AI products in the U.S. market, including a role-play chat app called Ohai, and a music video generator called Noisee, according to The Information. However, a spokesperson for the startup told the publication it didn’t have current plans to develop or release products outside of China.

In China, Moonshot, which is one of the country’s most valuable AI startups, has a popular chatbot called Kimi. The chatbot was launched last October, and is powered by the startup’s large language model (LLM), also called Kimi.

Other Notable Mentions

Other notable AI models include:

Kuaishou’s Kling: The first free-to-the-public text-to-video model, Kling, released in June.
iFlytek’s Spark Big Model V4.0: Released in June, it has “comprehensively improved its seven core capabilities” and was tested against GPT-4 Turbo.
Zhipu AI: Founded in 2019, it has a series of AI products and was one of the first Chinese AI companies to receive government approval to publicly release its models.

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