By Michael Scott
Tencent unveiled its ChatGPT rival. China’s major companies are betting on artificial intelligence this year.
Tencent is China’s most valuable firm and has indicated its intention to join its Silicon Valley counterparts in moving its attention towards artificial intelligence (AI) undertakings.
This news comes amid dropping revenues for the two-and-a-half-decade-old technology giant’s gaming sector. This division has contributed to almost 33% of the company’s profits.
Tencent’s Peaks and Valleys
A report from The Verdict shows that in 2018 the Chinese gaming sector generated deals worth $16.9B. In 2020, deals were reduced to $10.3B and further reduced to $158M as of last year.
Tencent experienced a significant drop in gaming earnings. The firm publishes international hit games Honor of Kings, PUBG: Backgrounds, and others.
Pony Ma, Tencent’s chief executive officer, spoke at a yearly corporate event in China where he called gaming the firm’s ‘flagship business.’ However, he cautioned that it encountered ‘considerable problems’ in the past year.
Seeking Alpha’s translation shows that Ma admitted the firm’s lagging position among Chinese rivals in the gaming industry. He said they have found themselves at a loss since their rivals keep producing new products, which makes them feel they have attained nothing.
China Embracing Artificial Intelligence
Pony indicates the firm’s intention to focus more on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies by responding to uncertain profits. He admitted that the firm was not presently the industry leader in artificial intelligence. However, he said they were not far behind its rivals.
Pony noted they can match the first-tier firms’ speed. The firm’s artificial intelligence ambitions might ride directly on Hunyuan’s shoulders. This large language model (LLM) is positioned as a local rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In September last year, Tencent unveiled Hunyan for enterprise use. It swiftly ascended among the ranks and became one of the nation’s most famous models, along with Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen.
Before ChatGPT’s arrival, China established a goal of becoming the international leader in AI by 2030. Nevertheless, Nvidia’s position as a hardware leader in the artificial intelligence race and OpenAI’s present international supremacy make it challenging to know if the nation’s ambitions are still viable.