What Llama 3 Means to China, ERNIE Bot Hits 200 Million Users
Hello readers, in this weekly issue, I’d like to discuss the implication of Llama 3 for China’s AI industry. Baidu’s ERNIE Bot reached a milestone of 200 million users. According to Stanford University’s latest report, China has produced 15 notable models in 2023, compared to the 61 models from the U.S.
What’s New:
On April 18, Meta unveiled its latest open-source Llama 3 series, which showcases superior performance over Llama 2. This launch poses a significant challenge to other Western LLM makers such as Anthropic, Google, and Mistral.
What I wanted to discuss is its potential impact on the Chinese LLM industry. Below are some of my preliminary thoughts and welcome your comments on this topic.
Good news for applications:
The release of Llama 3 8B and 70B offers Chinese AI application developers access to more powerful open models. Using Llama models in Chinese AI applications is nothing new. While China restricts nearly all Western LLMs, these regulations do not apply to open-source models that are not used to provide generative AI services to the public.
Allen Zhu, a prominent Chinese investor who backs Didichuxing and Xiaohongshu, once said the release of Llama 2 as a pivotal moment for Chinese AI applications. He also invested in multiple startups that benefit from AI products based on Llama 2.
Bad news for Llama copycats:
Llama 3 is expected to threaten Chinese open AI models, especially Llama copycats. Merely three days post-launch, the HuggingFace community witnessed six Chinese fine-tuned Llama 3 models. If these post-pretrained or fine-tuned Llama 3 models match or exceed the performance of leading Chinese open LLMs, the rationale for developing a model from scratch becomes questionable, especially with the anticipated summer release of Llama 3 400B, which will reach GPT-4 level and include multimodality and multilingual capabilities.
The release of Llama 3 also sparked a debate in China regarding whether open models will match closed models.
My two cents:
Unquestionably, open source plays a significant role in enhancing the prosperity and democracy of AI. However:
Cloud Service:
China’s leading public cloud service providers are embracing Llama 3, aiming to attract developers and SMEs.
What’s New:
At its recent developer event, Baidu CEO Robin Li announced that ERNIE Bot has reached 200 million users, doubling its user base in just four months.
Additionally, Baidu also launched ERNIE 4.0 Tool, now available in the pro version of ERNIE Bot. This version can answer users’ complex queries by combining multiple capabilities such as data analysis, coding, and image understanding and generation.
AI Ecosystem Expansion:
Baidu presented three development tools designed to simplify the creation of AI agents, applications, and models. By lowering the entry barrier for AI development, Baidu aims to lure more developers to build applications on top of ERNIE. You can read more at CNBC.
What’s New:
According to Stanford University’s annual AI Index report, China developed 15 notable machine learning models in 2023, placing it behind the U.S. but ahead of the U.K. and the European Union.
The U.S. also led in AI investment, with expenditures reaching $67.2 billion, nearly 8.7 times more than China, the second-highest investor.
China’s Dominance in Robotics and Patents:
China has taken the lead in the field of industrial robots and AI-related patents.
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