The Chinese tech giant Tencent made an announcement on Thursday, claiming that their new Tencent’s AI chatbot has capabilities comparable to the top US competitor, ChatGPT. This comes at a time when the global competition in artificial intelligence is intensifying.
Tencent’s chatbot, called “Hunyuan Aide,” was made available to the public on Thursday. This follows the release of a similar bot called ERNIE by another Chinese company, Baidu, just last month.
In response to these developments, Beijing introduced new regulations for AI developers last month. The goal is to allow them to compete with companies like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Microsoft while also closely managing online information.
During the Thursday event, Tencent demonstrated Hunyuan Aide’s capabilities live. The chatbot introduced itself in response to questions typed by an employee on a laptop and successfully solved a simple arithmetic problem.
During the livestreamed summit, Vice President Jiang Jie made some bold claims about the chatbot’s capabilities. He stated that the bot performed better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, a model that came before GPT-4, especially when it came to identifying tricky questions like “what is the safe way to speed.” Jiang even claimed that it surpassed GPT-4 when answering questions from the Chinese university entrance exam.
It’s important to note that AFP couldn’t independently verify these claims.
Jiang explained, “Compared to the open-source large language models commonly used today, our method effectively reduces the rate of generating false or nonsensical content by 30 to 50 percent.” This refers to the AI’s tendency to produce incorrect or meaningless responses.
Hunyuan Aide was trained on a massive dataset of over two trillion tokens and equipped with more than 100 billion parameters, which are the building blocks of language and the connections between them. This dataset will continue to be updated, Jiang mentioned.
Tencent, the owner of the WeChat super-app, stated that Hunyuan Aide possesses strong abilities in Chinese language writing, logical reasoning in complex language contexts, and reliable task execution.
The ChatGPT, which is powered by artificial intelligence and developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has become famous for its incredible skill to write essays, poems, or even computer code in mere seconds. This has led to concerns about cheating and worries that certain jobs might no longer be needed.
This week, a program on WeChat was launched, giving users the chance to access a beta version of Hunyuan Aide. However, as of Thursday, there was still a waiting list for people who wanted to try out the chatbot.
