“OpenAI's GPT series upgrades, which power ChatGPT, as well as substantial investments in supercomputing centers from tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, all scale laws,” Jiang said in a talk on Saturday. confirm the effectiveness of “Going forward, issues such as data availability, human resources, and return-on-investment concerns may affect the speed of scaling laws.”
Yet few Chinese AI firms have so far been able to compete with U.S. tech companies in LLM spending, and many have sought to develop client-facing applications that could generate revenue.
Since its establishment in April 2023, Stepfun has focused on developing basic models. At WAIC, he officially launched Step-2, a trillion parameter LLM, along with Step-1.5V multimodal model and Step-1X image generation model.
“In addition to scaling laws, multimodality is also important for building a global model,” Jiang said.
Global models are those that allow the development of an internal representation of the external environment by processing visual and other types of data. According to Jiang, Stepfun aims to combine creativity and understanding capabilities in a single model.
The company also operates consumer-facing products, including a ChatGPT-like personal assistant named Yuewen and Maopaoya, an AI companion that takes on the personalities of specific characters.
“Global AI investment reached US$22.4 billion last year, with 70 to 80 percent focused on companies developing large models,” said Alex Zhao Zhifeng, managing partner of Qiming Venture Partners, at another WAIC event. ” Qiming was an early investor in Stepfun.
Zhou mentioned that in the near future, there will be more investment in AI applications, benefiting from the decrease in the cost of tokens. In AI, a token is a basic unit of data that is processed by an algorithm.
China International Capital's economist Peng Wensheng said at the event that China's market size for AI models is expected to reach about 5.2 trillion yuan (US$715.1 billion) by 2030. The size of the industrial AI market will be about 9.4 trillion yuan. , he added.