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An installation reading “Follow Our Party Start Your Business” in front of Tencent Holdings' headquarters in Shenzhen on March 20, 2021. Photo: Bloomberg
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Tencent’s ChatGPT rival gets special task force of executives as it joins Baidu, Alibaba in AI gold rush

  • The team behind Tencent’s HunyuanAide chatbot is led by Zhang Zhengyou, who heads the company’s AI Lab and Robotics X Lab
  • Tencent is part of a Big Tech race to create a domestic alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been effectively banned in China
Tencent
Iris Deng
Iris Dengin Shenzhen
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Chinese social media and video gaming giant Tencent Holdings has set up a team led by its top scientist to develop a ChatGPT-like product, Chinese media outlet 36Kr reported on Monday, as the country’s largest tech firms including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding rush to develop domestic artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
The team behind HunyuanAide, as Tencent has named the bot, is a cross-departmental effort led by Zhang Zhengyou, who heads the company’s AI Lab and Robotics X Lab. Other members include company executives from its strategy and development unit, data platform, Tencent Cloud and video gaming unit, according to an organisation chart published by 36kr. A person familiar with the matter confirmed work on the HunyuanAide project.

The chatbot will be powered by Tencent’s AI model Hunyuan, which specialises in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), 36kr reported.

China’s ChatGPT ambitions challenged by US curbs on advanced AI chips

When asked about the project, Tencent reiterated a previous statement about the company plans to start working on ChatGPT-related technologies based on current AI models, including machine learning and NLP.

A slew of Chinese tech companies and universities have announced plans to develop or apply ChatGPT-style services to create China’s answer to the hit chatbot created by San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI.

Baidu, China’s internet search giant, announced its ChatGPT rival Ernie Bot could be released as early as March, with the aim of using it in an array of services from search and cloud computing to the Apollo autonomous driving platform.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, owner of the Post, said earlier this month that it is testing a ChatGPT-like service through its research institute Damo Academy.

Tencent has already been using its Hunyuan AI model in advertising, including making ad recommendations and producing tailor-made content for advertisers. The technology is able to help cut costs by creating videos based on text prompts, according to the company’s previous announcements.

Last year, Tencent also released Effidit, an AI-powered writing tool that can complete, correct, translate and polish text.

Despite the flurry of activity in AI, efforts to produce a rival to OpenAI’s improvisational chatbot face regulatory uncertainty in China, where access to ChatGPT has been curtailed amid concerns about the unpredictability of its answers. OpenAI services are not officially available in China but are often accessed through third-party apps.
These constraints could affect any products that come to market, as language models are limited by the type of content available to them and rules about what they can output.
Tencent and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba, have been told by Chinese regulators not to offer direct or third-party ChatGPT services on their platforms, Nikkei Asia reported last week.
DingTalk, Alibaba’s enterprise collaboration platform, deleted a user guide this month that explained how to add a ChatGPT bot to group chats.
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