Chinese tech giants such as Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are looking to offer lower-cost AI products to gain a competitive edge in the market. Baidu recently announced that their new competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, ERNIE Bot, has achieved a ten-fold improvement in inference efficiency, with reduced cost of large language model (LLM) inference now to one-tenth of its original level. Known as “inference”, this process mainly uses graphics processors or GPUs. This boosts AI accessibility for smaller and medium organizations, and cloud market share for tech giants.
Guosheng Securities, a state-owned financial services company, reported that training GPT-3 can cost an estimated $1.4 million per session, while training larger LLMs requires around $2 million. Chinese tech companies are trying to take advantage of this situation and tap into the field of generative AI based on large models.
Baidu is one of the top three Chinese technology companies along with Tencent and Alibaba. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Beijing, Baidu specializes in providing artificial intelligence and internet related services. Some of their services include search engine, mapping, cloud computing, content distribution and voice recognition. The company employs over 60,000 individuals and is listed on NASDAQ.
The founder of Baidu, Robin Li, is a Chinese entrepreneur who is now ranked as the world’s third richest tech billionaire with a net worth of around $63 billion. Li was one of the first to recognize the potential of the internet in China and transform it into a business entity. Li is known for his dedication, intelligence and risk-taking approach which has earned him the admiration of investors and customers alike.
