China Telecom, a state-owned service, has developed two LLMs that had been solely skilled on domestically produced processors.
This breakthrough demonstrates China’s progress towards chip independence, notably within the subject of AI.
The corporate’s AI Institute introduced that its open-source mannequin, TeleChat2-115B, together with one other undisclosed mannequin, was skilled on tens of 1000’s of Chinese language chips. That is particularly important given the US’s rising restrictions on China’s entry to cutting-edge chips, similar to Nvidia’s newest AI processors.
In keeping with the AI Institute, this achievement displays China’s full self-sufficiency in coaching its personal LLMs, which energy instruments like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In addition they regard it as the start of a brand new chapter within the nation’s pursuit of AI expertise innovation and independence.
China Telecom revealed that the unnamed mannequin options one trillion parameters. In layman’s phrases, parameters are the variables that an AI mannequin utilises to be taught throughout coaching; the extra parameters the mannequin has, the smarter and extra highly effective it’s. TeleChat2-115B, the opposite mannequin, has over 100 billion parameters.
Chinese language corporations are working exhausting to remain aggressive in AI, particularly given Washington’s export restrictions. Whereas China Telecom didn’t specify precisely who supplied the chips, the South China Morning Post reported that it has beforehand talked about Huawei’s Ascend chips as a part of its LLM improvement.
Huawei, which is beneath US sanctions, has recently begun testing a brand new AI processor with potential purchasers in China. Corporations are in search of alternate options to Nvidia’s high-end {hardware}, and Huawei seems to be stepping in to fill the hole.
In keeping with sources, Huawei has already supplied samples of its Ascend 910C processor to main Chinese language server corporations for testing. The chip can also be being made accessible to Chinese language web corporations, lots of which have lengthy relied on Nvidia’s expertise.
For native AI corporations, Huawei’s Ascend chips and coaching options are rising as viable alternate options to Nvidia’s choices. Along with Huawei, China Telecom is providing processors from Cambricon, a Chinese language start-up, by means of its State Cloud service.
These collaborations are doubtless to assist China minimise its reliance on international chips similar to Nvidia’s GPUs, which have lengthy been the popular possibility for coaching AI fashions.
With US export rules limiting entry to superior Nvidia GPUs such because the A100 and H100, a number of Chinese language AI companies have resorted to black markets. Nonetheless, many decide to make use of lower-powered alternate options to make sure that they’ll proceed to get pleasure from Nvidia’s official help and companies.
See additionally: US examines security risks posed by China Telecom and China Mobile’s operations
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