As the global artificial intelligence race heats up, Chinese tech company Tencent claimed on Thursday that its new chatbot has some capabilities on par with top US rival ChatGPT.
Tencent’s “Hunyuan Aide,” which it released to the public on Thursday, follows the same ERNIE Bot that was rolled out by fellow Chinese company Baidu last month.
Beijing introduced new rules for AI developers last month, aimed at allowing them to compete with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft, and to tighten control over online information.
Tencent gave a live demonstration of Hunyuan Aide’s capabilities on Thursday, with the bot identifying itself in response to questions typed by an employee on a laptop and solving a simple arithmetic problem.
Vice President Jiang Jie said at the summit, which was livestreamed, that the bot surpassed US-based Open AI’s earlier model GPT-3.5 and was on par with GPT-4 in identifying trick questions such as “what is the safe way to speed up”.
He also surpassed the latter when answering questions in Chinese university entrance exams, he said.
AFP were not able to independently verify the claims.
“Compared to open-source large language models currently common in the market, (our) method effectively reduces the confusion rate by 30 to 50 percent,” Jiang said, referring to the false and nonsensical content frequently churned out by AI.
Trained on more than two trillion tokens and equipped with more than 100 billion parameters — units of language and the variables that link them — as of July this year, Hunyuan Aide’s data set will be continuously updated, Jiang said.
Hunyuan Aide has “powerful Chinese language writing capabilities, the ability to draw logical conclusions in complex linguistic contexts and reliable task execution capabilities,” Tencent, which owns the WeChat super-app, said in a statement on Thursday.
Artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT created by San Francisco company OpenAI has caused a stir with its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand in seconds, sparking widespread fears of fraud or making the business obsolete.
Chinese tech giants have joined the global rush to develop competing software, with e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com also announcing similar projects.
A program on WeChat allowing users to access a beta version of Hunyuan Aide went online this week, though there was a waiting list on Thursday to try out the chatbot.