Chinese government-backed telecommunications giant China Telecom has announced plans to launch their own ChatGPT-likegenerative artificial intelligence (AI) service. This comes as various industry giants have been competing to dominate the AI space. The cloud unit of the China Telecom known as CTYun has already begun to pilot their pre-trained large language models, challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT which was released late last year and is already being used by millions.
The latest technology from CTYun is set to potentially be released in the near future, joining other tech behemoths such as Alibaba and NetEase who are already offering chatbots powered by this AI technology. Alibaba for instance has incorporated their Tongyi Qianwen LLM into the DingTalk platform for businesses, as well as their Tmall Genie smart speaker. Meanwhile, NetEase, which operates in the video game industry, debuted their own AI offering called CodeWave, which is geared towards helping enterprise customers to create software without requiring technical programming skills. Other major companies such as Tencent, SenseTime, JD.com and ByteDance have also advocated and plan to assist their customers in using LLMs to build AI solutions.
An important figure in this story is the CTYun general manager Hu Zhiqiang. Hu is the brains behind the CTYun initiative and the the natural language training model they are developing. He has been reported as optimistic in a statement to the South China Morning Post that their offering could potentially help “to further elevate the intelligent deep learning diversity and better improve the service capability of the AI models.”
China Telecom is a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company with offices in China, Europe, United States, Africa, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It is one of the leading ICT providers with about 232 million subscribers and customers across China. The company is primarily focused on providing fixed-line services, data communication and integrated information services, and is the largest fixed-line broadband and mobile operator in the country.
