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Tencent launches Yuanbao AI assistant app as internet giant moves to close gap with other Chinese chatbots
- Yuanbao can be used to analyse and summarise documents, provide questions and answers, and generate texts and images
- The chatbot was built on Tencent’s own large language model, Hunyuan
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Iris Dengin Shenzhen
Tencent Holdings on Thursday launched an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot app called Yuanbao, as the video gaming and social media giant races to catch up with other Chinese technology companies in developing applications to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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Yuanbao can be used to analyse and summarise documents, provide questions and answers, and generate texts and images, similar to the functions of ChatGPT and alternative Chinese AI chatbots.
Tencent’s AI assistant was built on the company’s own large language model (LLM) – the technology behind ChatGPT and other generative AI services – known as Hunyuan.
Hunyuan has been in a continuous process of enhancement over the past year and is now a trillion-parameter model, Tencent said on Thursday. An LLM is a deep-learning algorithm, trained on mountains of raw data from the internet, that can be adapted to accomplish tasks in various AI applications.
The launch of Yuanbao shows Tencent’s confidence to somehow close the gap with Chinese tech firms’ that have had a head start in building ChatGPT-like services, including Baidu, ByteDance and Moonshot AI.
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Yuanbao’s search results, for example, are accessible to the vast content ecosystem of Tencent’s WeChat. The multipurpose super app has a publishing platform called Official Accounts where creators can post articles and information, but this content is not accessible to search engines like Baidu or Google.
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