Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings has launched its industry-oriented large language model (LLM) service aimed at a wide array of traditional sectors from finance to media, making it the latest of China’s Big Tech firms to join the ChatGPT-frenzy.
The Shenzhen-based company’s cloud arm launched its LLM as a model-as-a-service [MaaS] solution at a technical event held on Monday in Beijing, according to a post published to its official WeChat account.
LLMs are deep language learning models that respond to textual user prompts in a human-like fashion, and provide the technology underpinning for ChatGPT, the chat bot developed by Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI.
Tencent Cloud’s LLM solutions will cater to industries ranging from finance, media, travel to education, with clients including China’s state media China Media Group, the Shanghai University, and Fujian Big Data Group among others, according to the WeChat post.
Together with clients, the company has launched over 50 LLM-enabled industrial solutions covering over 10 industries, Tang Daosheng said at the event, a senior executive vice-president at Tencent and chief executive of its cloud and smart industries group.
“Tencent will keep opening its ecosystem to provide quality [LLM] services for corporate clients,” said Tang, who added that the company will assist its clients in
training multimodels and speed up exploration of applying LLMs in more industrial scenarios.
Tencent’s foray into the local LLM arena will pit it against rivals including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, which are both looking to roll out their respective LLM applications for wider adoption among many businesses. Alibaba owns the Post.
ChatGPT’s success has goaded global tech firms into an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, with Chinese Big Tech firms falling over themselves to develop rival services.
Baidu was among the first domestic firms to launch a competitor service called Ernie Bot in March, with a promise to embed the AI chatbot into its existing services, including search.
At the March launch event, the Chinese search engine giant said that more than 650 companies have signed up to embed Ernie Bot into their services.
Alibaba’s cloud business, meanwhile, has also started baking its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI) into a range of service offerings, including meeting assistant Tingwu and Slack-like office collaboration platform DingTalk.
Other than the industrial LLM service launched on Monday, Tencent is also working on a foundational AI model dubbed Hunyuan, which is yet to be released. Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng, said earlier that his company was in no rush to launch unfinished products.
“[AI] is a once-in-a-century opportunity like the invention of electricity during the industrial revolution,” Ma said at the company’s latest earnings call in May.
“In the grand scheme of things, introducing the light bulb a month earlier wasn’t that important. The key [for us now] is to build a solid foundation of algorithms, computing power, data and more importantly, use cases.”
