Introduction
China’s leading generative artificial intelligence developers, such as Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, are in a hurry to upgrade their chatbots. They aim to enable these chatbots to handle super – long texts of up to 10 million Chinese characters. This move comes after Google’s lead. In February, Google unveiled the latest version of its Gemini large language model (LLM), which has a long “context window” allowing it to consider up to 1 million tokens, roughly equivalent to 700,000 English words, when generating a response.
Baidu’s Upgrade
According to a report from Chinastarmarket.cn on Friday, Baidu plans to launch a new version of its Ernie Bot in April. This new version will be able to process up to 5 million Chinese characters for free. As of now, the company has not immediately replied to a request for comment. This upgrade follows Google’s Gemini LLM update, which was only accessible to a limited group of developers and enterprise customers due to its high computational requirements.
Alibaba’s Move
Alibaba announced last week that its Tongyi Qianwen chatbot can now handle texts of around 10 million Chinese characters and will be available to all users free of charge. The company owns the South China Morning Post. This update of the Tongyi Qianwen chatbot allows users to input extremely long texts and get appropriate responses, significantly enhancing the chatbot’s functionality.
Moonshot AI’s Update
Moonshot AI, a generative AI start – up backed by Alibaba, announced a major update to its Kimi chatbot. Now, the chatbot can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt. The new feature is currently in beta testing and is only available to invited users before a wider roll – out. Moonshot AI is one of the most closely watched AI start – ups in China. Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it has raised the largest amount among Chinese AI companies, with over US$1 billion in a round last month led by Alibaba and venture capital firm HongShan (formerly the China unit of Sequoia Capital).
Our Say
The eagerness to expand context windows shows that Chinese AI giants are striving to catch up with Western tech leaders. Baidu and Alibaba were among the first in China to launch their own chatbots, four and five months after ChatGPT respectively. Upgrading Alibaba and Baidu’s chatbots to handle longer texts is a significant development in artificial intelligence. It demonstrates the companies’ dedication to innovation and emphasizes the great potential of AI technology. Looking ahead, it’s exciting to imagine the countless possibilities that AI chatbots offer for improving user experiences and driving technological progress.
