Shanghai (Reuters) – China's artificial intelligence company has announced two new industrial alliances. It aims to develop a domestic ecosystem to reduce reliance on foreign technologies to address US export restrictions on advanced NVIDIA chipsets.
The announcement was timed to coincide with the three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, which ends on Monday.
The meeting also featured numerous new products, such as Huawei's AI computing systems, that experts believe are offering Nvidia's most advanced products, as well as consumer-friendly products such as several types of digital AI glasses.
The Model Chip Ecosystem Innovation Alliance brings together Chinese developers of large-scale language models (LLMS) and AI chip makers.
“It's an innovative ecosystem that connects a complete technology chain from chips to models to infrastructure,” said Zhao Lidong, CEO of Enflame, one of the participating chip makers.
Other manufacturers of the Alliance's Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) include Huawei, Biren, and Moore threads. This has been hit by US sanctions that block purchasing advanced technologies made with US know-how. The alliance was announced by LLM developer Stepfun.
The second alliance, the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce and Industry AI Committee, aims to “promote the deep integration of AI technology and industrial transformation.”
Participants include Sensetime, authorized by the US, and are pivoted to LLMS from facial recognition technology. Others are Stepfun and another LLM developer Minimax, as well as Chipmakers Metax and Iluvatar Corex.
One of the most talked about products at the conference was Huawei's CloudMatrix 384, which incorporates 384 of the latest 910C chips.
Huawei's system design capabilities mean that more chips and system-level innovation can be used to compensate for the weaker performance of individual chips, Semianalysis said.
At least six other Chinese computing companies have introduced similar “clustering” chip technology. Metax has demonstrated an AI supernode with a 128 C550 chip designed to support the requirements of large-scale flow cooling data centers.
Other events include Tencent's announcement of the open source Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0. The company says it will allow users to generate interactive 3D environments through text or image prompts.
Baidu has announced that it is the next generation of “digital human” technology that will help businesses create virtual live streamers. It features “cloning technology” that allows you to replicate human voice, tone and body language from just 10 minutes of sample footage.
