Exclusive | PolyU’s top AI scientist Yang Hongxia seeks to revolutionise LLM development in Hong Kong

Mainland Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) scientist Yang Hongxia, the newly named professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), is on a mission to revolutionise the development of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT – from her base in the city.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Yang – who previously worked on AI models at ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy – said she wants to change the existing resource-intensive process of training LLMs into a decentralised, machine-learning paradigm. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

“The rapid advances in generative AI, spearheaded by OpenAI’s GPT series, have unlocked immense possibilities,” she said. “Yet this progress comes with significant disparities in resource allocation.”

At present, Yang said LLM development has mostly relied on deploying advanced and expensive graphics processing units (GPUs), from the likes of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, in data centres for projects involving vast amounts of raw data, which has put deep-pocketed Big Tech companies and well-funded start-ups at a major advantage.