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Well before Washington ostracize Nvidia ’s exports of in high spirits - performance graphical processing unit to China , the state ’s technical school giants had been hoarding them in prevision of an escalating technical school warfare between the two Nation .

Baidu , one of the technical school firms building China ’s counterparts to OpenAI , has ensure enough AI fries to keep train its ChatGPT equivalent Ernie Bot for the “ next twelvemonth or two , ” the firm ’s chief executive officer Robin Li said on anearnings callthis hebdomad .

“ Also , illation requires less powerful fleck , and we trust our chip reserves , as well as other option , will be sufficient to support lots of AI - aboriginal apps for the destruction users , ” he say . “ And in the retentive streak , have difficulty in larn the most in advance french-fried potatoes needs bear upon the pace of AI development in China . So , we are proactively search alternatives . ”

Other deep - pocketed Formosan tech companies have also been need proactive measures in response to U.S. export controls . Baidu , ByteDance , Tencent and Alibaba collectively ordered around 100,000 units of A800 processors Nvidia to be delivered this twelvemonth , costing them as much as $ 4 billion , the Financial Timesreportedin August . They also purchased $ 1 billion worth of GPUs that are schedule for delivery in 2024 .

Such heavy upfront investment could easily dissuade many inauguration from enter the LLM race . Exceptions do exist if the young occupation manages to insure liberal investments rapidly . 01.AI , which was founded in recent March by prominent investor Kai - Fu Lee , larn a substantial number of high - performance inference chips through loansand has already paid off its debt after raising capital that valued it at $ 1 billion .

With its backlog of GPUs , Baidu recently launched the Ernie Bot 4 , which Li claimed is “ not inferior in any respect to GPT-4 . ”

Rating LLM is tricky thanks to the bluff complexity of these AI models . Many Formosan AI firms have resorted to rank boosting by diligently accomplish the criteria of LLM charts , but the effectiveness of these models when applied to substantial app real - life story is still pending judgment .

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Smaller AI musician , lacking the cash rate of flow to hoard chips , will have to ensconce for less powerful processors that are n’t under U.S. exportation controls . or else , they can look likely acquisition opportunities . Li anticipate that with a confluence of factors , including the scarcity of sophisticated chips , high requirement for information and AI talent , and huge upfront investments , the industriousness will soon transition into a “ integration level . ”

Valued at $ 1B , Kai - Fu Lee ’s LLM startup unveils open source model