Chinese generative AI developers rush to upgrade chat bots to handle super long texts
- The move follows Google, which recently unveiled the latest version of its Gemini LLM that can handle up to 1 million tokens, or roughly 700,000 English words
- Last week, generative AI start-up Moonshot AI announced a major update of its Kimi chat bot that can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt
China’s biggest generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers, including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, have rushed to upgrade their chat bots so they can handle super long texts of up to 10 million Chinese characters.
The move follows Google, which in February unveiled the latest version of its Gemini large language model (LLM) that achieves a long “context window”, the maximum amount of text an LLM can consider when generating a response, of up to 1 million tokens, or roughly 700,000 English words.
Unlike Google, which only made the update available to “a limited group of developers and enterprise customers” as it is “computationally intensive”, according to its blog, Baidu will in April launch a new version of its Ernie Bot that can process up to 5 million Chinese characters for free, according to a report by Chinese media Chinastarmarket.cn on Friday.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Similarly, Alibaba said last week that its Tongyi Qianwen chat bot, now able to handle texts comprising around 10 million Chinese characters, would be available for all users free of charge. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
