Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, speaks at the HICOOL Global Entrepreneur Summit on September 11, 2021 in Beijing, China.
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BEIJING – Chinese artificial intelligence models may be at least six months behind those developed in the US, but Chinese AI apps are likely to take off much faster, says Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China.
He was referring to large language models trained on massive amounts of data that can process and produce text, images and videos.
The top Chinese companies’ LLMs lag behind their U.S. counterparts by about six to nine months, while less advanced Chinese models can lag behind the U.S. by about 15 months, Lee said. He spoke at the AVCJ Private Equity Forum China on Wednesday.
Lee, author of “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” is a widely followed commentator on AI and is the founder of startup 01.AI and venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.
“Apps will, I predict, grow much faster in China than in the US early next year,” Lee said, noting that the cost of training a good AI model has dropped significantly.
‘It is inevitable that China will do that [build] the best AI apps in the world,” he said. “But it is not clear whether these will be built by large or small companies.”
Lee, whose startup focuses on search apps, said it could take five to eight years to take generative AI consumer applications to the next level: a single “super app” that can perform multiple tasks.
The industry will likely need entirely new devices in place of existing smartphones, he said, adding: “The right device should be always on and always listening.”
Major Chinese companies such as Alibaba.com And Tencent have released their AI models and business products. These companies and investors have also backed several AI startups.
Beijing-based ShengShu Technology, backed by Alibaba affiliate Ant Group, announced Wednesday that its text-to-video model Vidu has introduced a new feature to improve how a key element or character in AI-generated clips appears consistently and without distortion. can be displayed. This allows advertisers to create promotional videos for their products.
Vidu was released earlier this year and its basic tools are open to the public, with more advanced capabilities available via subscription. Co-founder and CEO Jiayu Tang told reporters on Wednesday that several companies were interested in buying ShengShu’s services, and were not just exploring the technology.