“OpenAI's upgrade to its GPT series, which powers ChatGPT, and the heavy investments made by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Meta in supercomputing centers all attest to the validity of the scaling laws,” Jiang said in his speech on Saturday. “Going forward, issues such as the availability of data and human resources, as well as concerns about return on investment, may affect the pace of progress of the scaling laws.”
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Inside a Chinese factory that makes humanoid robots with enhanced facial movements
Inside a Chinese factory that makes humanoid robots with enhanced facial movements
But so far, few Chinese AI companies have been able to match U.S. tech giants in LLM spending, with many aiming to develop customer-facing applications that can generate revenue.
Since its establishment in April 2023, Stepfun has been focusing on the development of foundational models. At WAIC, it has officially released Step-2, a 1 trillion parameter LLM, Step-1.5V multimodal model, and Step-1X image generation model.
“Apart from scaling laws, multimodality is also extremely important in constructing a world model,” Jiang said.
A world model is one that allows a machine to develop an internal representation of the external environment by processing visual and other types of data. Jiang said Stepfun aims to combine generation and understanding capabilities into a single model.
The company also operates consumer products such as Yuewen, a ChatGPT-like personal assistant, and Maopaoya, an AI companion that takes on the personality of a specific character.
“Global AI investment reached $22.4 billion last year, with 70 to 80 percent focused on companies developing large-scale models,” Alex Zhou Jifeng, managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, said at another WAIC side event. Qiming was an early investor in Stepfun.
Zhou said that in the near future, there will be more investment in AI applications, which are benefiting from falling token costs — in AI, tokens are the basic unit of data processed by algorithms.
Peng Wensheng, an economist at China International Capital, said at the event that China's AI model market size is expected to reach about 5.2 trillion yuan (US$715.1 billion) by 2030. The industrial AI market size will be about 9.4 trillion yuan, he added.
