Tencent showed off its tech on the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, July 8, 2023.
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Chinese tech giant Tencent is launching its artificial intelligence model “Hunyuan” for business use at an annual summit on Thursday, Dowson Tong, CEO of the cloud and smart industries group at Tencent, told CNBC in an exclusive interview ahead of the event.
The news comes days after Baidu revealed a slew of AI-powered applications on Tuesday within the wake of more supportive regulation.
Tencent has said it was internally testing its Hunyuan AI model on promoting and fintech. The gaming and social media giant can be set to release an AI chatbot on Thursday, the corporate said in an online post.
Tencent is integrating Hunyuan’s capabilities with its existing products for video conferencing and social media, Tong told CNBC.
The corporate operates WeChat, a widely used messaging and payments app in China, and video conference platform Tencent Meeting.
Baidu and a number of other other Chinese firms received the green light in the previous couple of weeks to release AI-powered chatbots to the general public.
Much like ChatGPT, the bots purport to reply to queries in a human-like, conversational fashion — but primarily in Chinese. Some, similar to Baidu’s Ernie bot, also convert text to pictures and video, with the assistance of plugins.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not officially available in China. The chatbot releases follow latest Chinese regulation on generative AI that took effect Aug. 15.
When asked concerning the rules, Tong identified that such artificial intelligence is so latest that nobody knows what impact it should have on society.
“It’s prudent to place in some guardrails in place,” he said. That can help make sure that the technology or the services being offered are of high enough quality in order that they don’t create and distribute false information, he said.
Chinese authorities said the “interim” rules that took effect last month wouldn’t apply to firms developing the AI tech so long as the product was not available to the mass public.
That is more relaxed than a draft released in April that said forthcoming rules would apply even on the research stage.
Development constraints
While Beijing has shown it’s more supportive of generative AI than initially feared, Chinese firms also face U.S. restrictions on obtaining advanced semiconductors. Essentially the most leading edge versions of the high-tech chips, referred to as graphics processing units (GPUs), allow firms to coach AI models.
“The constraint that we’re facing will hinder the progress, the speed of development,” Tong told CNBC in response to a matter about U.S. restrictions.
He noted demand for computing power overall far exceeds supply in China. To mitigate the shortage, he said firms are “specializing in specific use cases, constructing models of the suitable size.”
“And we hope that the availability of the GPU compute might be larger in the approaching months, and subsequently the event of those technologies can get faster.”
AI for business
Tencent is just certainly one of many firms in China — starting from startups to phone maker Huawei — which have rushed to announce AI products this yr. In August, Alibaba announced it was opening its own AI model to third-party developers.
Artificial intelligence requires industry-specific training for the technology to generate value, Tencent’s Tong said. He listed business use cases in tourism, finance, public services and customer support.
“We imagine many alternative customers, actually, would profit more by leveraging open-source models and use their very own enterprise data to coach for their very own models to fulfill the very specific needs of their industrial use cases,” he said.
That designated use may also help with data protection, he said.
