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It’s no secret that China idea of technological advancement often boils down to copying whatever the US has come up with. When it comes to artificial intelligence that’s still what is happening. A few weeks ago Wired published an article about a Chinese AI startup that it said was winning the Open AI race:
Meta shook up the race to build more powerful artificial intelligence last July by releasing Llama 2, an AI model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, for anyone to download and use. In November, a little-known startup from Beijing, 01.AI, released its own open source model that outperforms Llama 2 and scores near the top of many leaderboards used to compare the power of AI models.
Sounds impressive but much later in the story we get this.
Not long after the Chinese model was released, some developers noticed that 01.AI’s code had previously included mentions of Meta’s model that were later removed. Richard Lin, 01.AI’s head of open source, later said that the company would revert the changes, and the company has credited Llama 2 for part of the architecture for Yi-34B. Like all leading language models, 01.AI’s is based on the “transformer” architecture first developed by Google researchers in 2017, and the Chinese company derived that component from Llama 2…
The connection with Meta’s Llama 2 is an example of how despite Lee’s confidence in China’s AI expertise it is currently following America’s lead in generative AI. Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor at George Washington University who studies China’s AI scene, says that although Chinese researchers have released dozens of large language models, the industry as a whole still lags behind the US.
So the Chinese have made some new versions of open source tech from the US but they are still several years behind the leaders. Today the NY Times published an article focused on the irony of this situation.
The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA.
There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came from LLaMA. Mr. Lee’s start-up then built on Meta’s technology, training its system with new data to make it more powerful.
