Trends

Chinese generative AI developers rush to upgrade chatbots to handle super-long texts

AuthorBTW Editorial

Reading Time2 min

PublishedMarch 26, 2024

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Headline

Context

China’s biggest generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers, including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, have rushed to upgrade their chatbots 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.

Evidence

Pending intelligence enrichment.

Analysis

Also read: Apple in talks to let Google’s Gemini power iPhone AI features Also read: Chinese AI chatbot Kimi handles 2 million characters, up from 200k 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 on Friday. Similarly, Alibaba said last week that its “Tongyi Qianwen” chatbot would be free to all users. The chatbot can now process text with about 10 million Chinese characters.

Key Points

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 chatbot that can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt.