The CEO of Baidu, one of the top AI companies in China, issued a warning on Wednesday, stating that the country’s haste to create massive language models may result in resource waste.
Speaking at a Shenzhen industry forum, Robin Li expressed concerns about a possible industry shakeout since businesses creating huge language models are still struggling to come up with sustainable business plans.
In China, generative artificial intelligence has garnered a lot of attention since OpenAI released its chatbotChatGPT late last year. Both well-established businesses and startups have entered the market.
“I’ve observed a phenomenon where many industries, companies and even cities are purchasing hardware, stocking chips, building computing centres to train proprietary large models from scratch.” He said.
Although there are a lot of huge models in China, Li claimed that there are still relatively few AI applications that are based on large models.
Li reported that as of October, 238 big language models were available, compared to just 79 in June, based on a third-party report.
In August Baidu unveiled its own large language model, named Ernie, to the general public, after other products that have been given government clearance for distribution.
