Chinese artificial intelligence company iFlyTek claims its LLM computers are fully trained on Huawei's platform

In his keynote speech, Liu noted that U.S. restrictions on technologies that facilitate the development of LLMs - the foundation of AI products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT - underscore the urgent need for China to develop its own computing infrastructure for AI training. U.S. sanctions have restricted exports to China of some technologies, most notably Nvidia's advanced graphics processors, that have fueled the AI boom in recent years.

Liu told the audience that the company's Xinghuo models are trained on the Feixing Yihao computing platform, which is based on Huawei's Ascend computing solutions.

Huawei's Ascend AI chips are quickly gaining popularity in China. The performance of the Ascend 910B chip, as shown in some tests, is 80 to 120 percent compared to Nvidia's A100 in LLM training, said Wang Tao, chief operating officer of Jiangsu Kunpeng Ecosystem Innovation Center, on the sidelines of the Nanjing World Semiconductor Conference this month.

Analysts say Ascend's solution is China's best chance in developing its own AI infrastructure. According to Li Yanwei, a Beijing-based technical consultant working in the field of intelligent computing, support from state-owned companies is growing as they place orders for projects using Ascend.

Huawei's hardware still doesn't have as active a developer community as Nvidia's Cuda platform, the software that supports AI computing on the company's GPUs, Li said.

"Huawei's chances of catching up with Nvidia are minimal if it doesn't solve this problem," Li said.

At the Xinghuo 4 launch, iFlyTek's Liu boasted that the new model's capabilities can match the GPT-4 Turbo, one of the most advanced models from OpenAI, which was released more than eight months ago.

Xinghuo 4 has already found practical applications in various business scenarios, including in healthcare where it assists doctors and patients in diagnosis and treatment, according to a presentation at the event.