Chinese AI Giants Catch Up with Western Tech Leaders in Chatbot Upgrades

The latest development in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen Chinese tech giants, including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, rush to upgrade their chatbots to handle super long texts of up to 10 million Chinese characters. This move follows Google’s unveiling of its Gemini large language model (LLM) that can handle up to 1 million tokens, or roughly 700,000 English words.

The ability to process long texts can help summarise research papers, compare resumes and study computing code.

The upgrade is significant, as it reflects the eagerness of Chinese AI giants to catch up with Western tech leaders. The ability to process long texts can have numerous applications, including summarizing research papers, comparing resumes, and studying computing code.

Baidu will launch a new version of its Ernie Bot in April, which can process up to 5 million Chinese characters for free. Similarly, Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen chatbot can now handle texts comprising around 10 million Chinese characters and will be available for all users free of charge. Alibaba-backed generative AI start-up Moonshot AI has also announced a major update of its Kimi chatbot, which can now handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt.

Chatbots are becoming increasingly advanced

However, the leap to larger context windows is constrained by limited computing power. OpenAI’s GPT-4, for example, supports 32,000-token context windows, available for paying subscribers at 6 US cents for every 1,000 tokens as input and 12 US cents for output of the same size.

Computing power is a limiting factor in AI development

The rush to expand context windows reflects the intense competition in the AI development space. As AI technology continues to advance, we can expect to see even more innovative applications in the future.

The future of AI is bright