BEIJING, February 27 (TMTPOST)— Another Chinese tech giant is engaging with artificial intelligence (AI) project similar with OpenAI's wildly popular ChatGPT.

Source: Visual China

Tencent Holdings Ltd. has launched an AI-powered conversational project dubbed HunyuanAide, and members at the new project will collaborate with multiple teams inside the company to create large language models with a great number of parameters, aiming to improve its existing intelligent assistant tools, develop its own large assistant and grow into domestic leader in the sector through stable reinforcement learning algorithms, Chinese digital tech media outlet 36Kr learned from many sources on Monday.   

Tencent has appointed its Chief Scientist Zhengyou Zhang as owner of HunyuanAide and the project has at least seven team leaders and seven sponsors, almost all the officials involved are key figures at the behemoth, according to the media. Zhang is the founder and leader at Tencent’s Robotic X Lab and also served as head of AI Lab since 2018. In August 2021, Tencent announced he became the first researcher or outstanding scientist of grade 17, which is the highest professional rank in the company’s history. Prior to joining in Tencent, he worked for Microsoft Search as a research manager and principal researcher, contributing for developing a number of offerings such as Windows, Office, Xbox, Kinect, Skype for Business, Office Lens. As a specialist in computer vision and graphics, Zhang was named a recipient of the 2013 Helmholtz Test of Time Award, which was awarded to him by the International Conference on Computer Vision.

It was reported that HuyuanAide has three product managers--Yu Dong, vice director at AI Lab, Wang Di, Assistant General Manager at AI Lab, and Liu Tian, director at Strategy Department, and Yu may take charge of reinforcement learning and multi-turn dialogue, while Wang and Liu will focus on large models and commercialization respectively. One of the project’s team leader is said to be Ying Shan, Zhang’s former co-worker at Microsoft Research and the current director and scientist at Tencent’s PCG-ARC Lab. A wide range of executives are involved in the project as sponsors, such as Lu Shan, senior executive vice president (EVP) and the president of the Technology and Engineering Group (TEG), Tang Daosheng, another EVP and the CEO of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG), Jiang Jie, vice president of TEG as well as vice president of Corporate Development Group (CDG), Cui Xiaochun, vice president of Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG).

Tencent has long been working at the AI related offerings and has promoted its special research in an orderly manner, the company responded later Monday. It vowed to have further development and exploration on the cutting-edge technologies based on previous expertise on AI large models, machine learning algorithms and Natural language processing (NLP).

The news came as more and more Chinese companies are joining in the AI race spurred by ChatGPT. Earlier this month, Baidu confirmed about launch of ChatGPT-style Ernie Bot, and said the AI-powered conversational bot is set to be available for the public when it ends internal testing in March. Then News about Alibaba’s ChatGPT-like application labeled “pre-release” was circulated online. The e-commerce superpower was said to have entered into the stage of internal testing and name of the app has not been finalized yet.

Tencent has acquired the ChatGPT-related technologies such as large AI models, machine learning algorithms and NLP tech, and its recent developments including updated Effidit, a writing assistant developed by Tencent AI Lab, and HunYuan-NLP-1T, a large AI model which understands Chinese better, Shanghai Securities Journal, the state-owned national newspaper, reported more than two weeks ago.

Alibaba’s peer JD.com will continue to integrate the same ways and technologies as those empowers ChatGPT with own products and services to promote the AI industry, Xiaodong He, Vice President of Tech and President of AI Services & Products at JD, told Chinese media The Paper following Baidu’s Ernie Bot confirmed.

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