Nicely earlier than Washington banned Nvidia’s exports of high-performance graphic processing items to China, the nation’s tech giants had been hoarding them in anticipation of an escalating tech conflict between the 2 nations.
Baidu, one of many tech corporations constructing China’s counterparts to OpenAI, has secured sufficient AI chips to maintain coaching its ChatGPT equal Ernie Bot for the “next year or two,” the agency’s CEO Robin Li stated on an earnings name this week.
“Also, inference requires less powerful chips, and we believe our chip reserves, as well as other alternatives, will be sufficient to support lots of AI-native apps for the end users,” he stated. “And in the long run, having difficulties in acquiring the most advanced chips inevitably impacts the pace of AI development in China. So, we are proactively seeking alternatives.”
Different deep-pocketed Chinese language tech corporations have additionally been taking proactive measures in response to U.S. export controls. Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba collectively ordered round 100,000 items of A800 processors Nvidia to be delivered this yr, costing them as a lot as $4 billion, the Monetary Occasions reported in August. Additionally they bought $1 billion value of GPUs which are scheduled for supply in 2024.
Such heavy upfront investments may simply deter many startups from getting into the LLM race. Exceptions do exist if the younger enterprise manages to safe good-looking investments shortly. 01.AI, which was based in late March by distinguished investor Kai-Fu Lee, acquired a considerable variety of high-performance inference chips via loans and has already paid off its debt after elevating capital that valued it at $1 billion.
With its reserve of GPUs, Baidu not too long ago launched the Ernie Bot 4, which Li claimed is “not inferior in any respect to GPT-4.”
Ranking LLMs is hard because of the sheer complexity of those AI fashions. Many Chinese language AI corporations have resorted to rating boosting by diligently fulfilling the standards of LLM charts, however the effectiveness of those fashions when utilized to actual purposes real-life remains to be pending judgment.
Smaller AI gamers, missing the money movement to hoard chips, must accept much less highly effective processors that aren’t beneath U.S. export controls. Alternatively, they’ll await potential acquisition alternatives. Li expects that with a confluence of things, together with the shortage of superior chips, excessive demand for knowledge and AI expertise, and large upfront investments, the trade will quickly transition right into a “consolidation stage.”