Internet heavyweight Tencent unleashed its key generative AI technology on Thursday, declaring “war has begun” with about a dozen rivals fighting to be China’s national artificial intelligence champion.China’s largest company by market value introduced “Hunyuan”, a large language model (LLM) of the type powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the US service that has inspired a legion of companies to try to emulate its success in AI.
“There are more than 130 large language models in China,” Tencent vice-president Jiang Jie told a launch event in the southern city of Shenzhen. “A war of a hundred models has begun.”
Tencent, which runs the WeChat super app and has extensive gaming interests, has begun by focusing on the enterprise. It launched AI cloud services in June for sectors including finance, media, travel and education.