NetEase said it is looking to leverage the prowess of generative artificial intelligence (AI) – which refers to software that can create new text, images or video – to improve its business intelligence and asset management services.
In November, an AI arms race among tech giants was kicked off with the launch of ChatGPT, the conversational bot from Microsoft-backed US start-up OpenAI, which became a viral sensation for its ability to write coherent essays, poems and programming code.
Since 2018, NetEase has initiated research on OpenAI’s GPT family of LLMs, and has worked on more than 10 supersized pre-training models in areas including natural language processing, as well as text-to-image and audio models.
But NetEase faces intense competition from domestic rivals.
NetEase’s office in Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park. Photo: Shutterstock
China’s largest search engine operator Baidu in March released Ernie Bot, its answer to ChatGPT, while e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post, introduced in April its Tongyi Qianwen model, whose name translates as “seeking truth from a thousand queries”.
After DingTalk, Tongyi Qianwen is also expected to be integrated into Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s Internet of Things-enabled smart home appliance, the company said.
Earlier this month, Tencent Holdings’ cloud unit launched its next-generation high-performance computing cluster that “provides computational power for training LLMs and self-driving technologies with high bandwidth and low latency”.
