Chinese technology giant Tencent has unveiled its latest chatbot, “Hunyuan Aide,” asserting that it possesses capabilities comparable to its prominent US counterpart, ChatGPT. This announcement comes amid the escalating global race in the field of artificial intelligence.
Tencent’s Hunyuan Aide, introduced to the public recently, closely follows Baidu’s release of the ERNIE Bot just a month prior. These developments are set against the backdrop of new regulations in Beijing, designed to allow Chinese AI developers to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and Microsoft while maintaining strict control over online information.
Tencent’s live demonstration of Hunyuan Aide’s capabilities showcased the chatbot’s ability to introduce itself in response to typed questions and solve basic arithmetic problems. Vice President Jiang Jie claimed during a livestreamed summit that Hunyuan Aide outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and matches GPT-4 in identifying complex questions, such as deciphering the “safe way to speed.” Notably, it even surpassed GPT-4 in answering questions from the Chinese university entrance exam, according to Jiang. However, it’s worth noting that independent verification of these claims is currently unavailable.
Jiang emphasized the effectiveness of their method, reducing the rate of false and nonsensical content, known as “hallucination,” produced by AI models by 30 to 50 percent. Hunyuan Aide, trained on a dataset comprising over two trillion tokens and equipped with over 100 billion parameters, will receive continuous updates. Tencent touted the chatbot’s strong Chinese language writing capabilities, its ability to make logical inferences in intricate linguistic contexts, and its reliable task execution abilities.
The rise of artificial intelligence-powered models like ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco’s OpenAI, has sparked concerns about their capacity to generate essays, poems, or programming code instantly, leading to fears of cheating and potential job displacement. Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba and JD.com, have joined the global race to develop similar software.
A beta version of Hunyuan Aide became accessible to WeChat users this week, although there remained a waiting list on Thursday for those eager to test the chatbot’s capabilities.