China’s AI industry faces shakeout, leaving only a dozen top tier LLMs, expert says
- Among the 200-plus AI models that have been launched in China, only a dozen will be considered ‘top tier’ by the end of this year, one expert said
China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry is entering a rapid period of consolidation after large language model (LLM) development mushroomed last year, industry experts said.
“[LLM competition] has entered the finals this year,” Alex Zhou, managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, said at the Future Tech Summit 2024, held by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) in Shenzhen on Thursday. Among the 200-plus models that have been launched in China, only a dozen players will be considered “top tier” by the end of the year, Zhou said. Globally, there will only be 20 or so LLM finalists, he added.
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets, and they are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT.
For players to successfully commercialise and apply their LLMs, Zhou said they need to address the three challenges of infrastructure, algorithms and data. For the first, clusters of 10,000 graphic processing units are a must for training models, and access to proprietary data would make a difference in competition for different LLMs.
China’s generative AI market has become crowded, with more than 200 LLMs developed since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, according to government estimates, while global players like OpenAI and Google are locked out of the mainland market.
