The Chinese speech recognition company iFlytek presented its chatbot “SparkDesk” at a public event. In a live demonstration, CEO Liu Qingfeng showed the ChatGPT competitor for use in education and enterprise. The goal, according to Liu, is for SparkDesk to “exceed the capabilities of OpenAI in Chinese and meet the standards of ChatGPT in English.”
Confucius at the Olympic Games
During the presentation in the eastern city of Hefei, Liu SparkDesk had students evaluate essays and write hypothetical stories about Confucius’ participation in the Beijing Olympics—instructions were provided in Chinese and English. The audience was given an opportunity to ask questions during the event, Bloomberg and China Daily report.
“The impact of this generative AI technology is no less important than that of the invention of the personal computer or the Internet,” Liu said. “We must do our best to learn from ChatGPT and even try to surpass it.” iFlytek’s entry into the race to build a ChatGPT competitor comes just after China released draft guidelines on security testing of generative AI services. In addition to the existing guidelines for curbing output critical of the regime, the draft was expanded to include “truthful and accurate” AI models.
Long-term chip supply is questionable
There are also concerns about the long-term supply of Chinese companies with the high-end chips required for large-scale language models, reports Bloomberg further. Along with other Chinese companies, iFlytek has been on the US government’s blacklist since 2019 and is no longer allowed to easily purchase components from the USA. The reason is the violation of US foreign policy interests in connection with the surveillance of the Uyghurs.
iFlytek is a Chinese AI company applying deep learning to speech recognition, speech processing, machine translation and data mining. In 2017, the company was worth around twelve billion dollars and the “iFlytek Input” app, which can also translate Chinese into English via voice input, was already used by 500 million people that year. With SparkDesk, iFlytek is competing in its own country with the recently introduced language models Ernie from Baidu and Tongyi Qianwen from Alibaba.
(bme)
