Shanghai AI start-up founded by ex-Microsoft engineers bets on ‘scaling law’ to boost AI capabilities
- Chinese AI start-ups face the common challenge of restricted access to the most advanced AI chips from US supplier Nvidia
A Shanghai-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, founded a year ago by a former vice-president at Microsoft, is betting on so-called “scaling law” to enhance its AI capabilities, despite the difficulties in obtaining advanced chips, an executive said.
China’s demand for higher computing power will be never ending amid the generative AI boom, Zhu Yibo, head of systems at AI start-up StepFun, or Jieyue Xingchen in Chinese, said at a media briefing in Shanghai on Thursday. “Computing power, systems, data, and algorithms are the cores in the pursuit of the scaling law,” he added.
StepFun, founded by Microsoft Asia Research Institute’s former chief scientist Jiang Daxin in 2023, is one of the many Chinese AI start-ups trying to catch up with US peers in AI computing power. It has launched the Step-1V multimodal large language model (LLM) with over 100 billion parameters, and it is testing the Step-2V model that boasts over one trillion parameters.
The push for greater computing power stems from a belief in the scaling law, which states that as the size of a model and its training data increases, the model’s performance improves. However, Chinese AI start-ups face the common challenge of restricted access to the most advanced AI chips from US supplier Nvidia, making their quest more difficult.
