China’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups are looking to chase down new opportunities in their field, following the preview of an advanced new series of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI services – by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, according to executives at Alibaba Cloud’s Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
OpenAI o1, previewed earlier this month by the Microsoft-backed firm, represents a so-called generative pre-trained transformer model, designed “to reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding and maths”, according to the San Francisco-based company.
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“[OpenAI o1] is indeed of great significance,” Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, said on Thursday at the main forum of the three-day conference, which runs until Saturday. Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology backbone of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
“The most important question here is whether you can do further scaling through reinforcement learning, which completely raises the upper limit of AI,” Yang said, referring to the so-called scaling law on how an LLM’s performance improves as its size and training data increases.
The 31-year-old Moonshot AI founder expected OpenAI o1 to “cause some changes in the structure of many industries and create new opportunities for start-ups”.
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According to an update by OpenAI this week, the new models were trained “to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would”.