Huawei would be developing a GPU dedicated to artificial intelligence tasks to accelerate the advancement of this technology in China. According to early reports, the hardware would be as powerful as an A100, the NVIDIA card behind GPT-4 (ChatGPT) and other language models.
In accordance with Tom’s Hardwarethe existence of this GPU was revealed during the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum 2023. Liu Qingfeng, founder of the artificial intelligence company iFlytek, confirmed that Huawei develops a graphics card as powerful as NVIDIA’s A100which would be used to train one of the company’s models.
“I am very happy to inform you that Huawei’s GPU capacity is now the same as NVIDIA A100,” he said. According to Qingfeng, the project is of great importance to Ren Zhengfei, CEO of Huawei. The iFlytek president added that while China has no problem developing AI algorithms, computing power is an obstacle.
A few months ago, USA announced a measure that prevents export of AI chips to China. The new policy is part of a plan that restricts the Asian giant’s ability to obtain advanced technology to produce supercomputers. This led Huawei to develop an alternative, although the process is more complicated than it seems.
Under the Commerce Department’s Foreign Direct Goods Rule, the ban is not only limited to chips, but also to machinery. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) tightened regulations to prevent any company in the world from selling equipment to produce semiconductors to China. Because of this, Huawei has explored all options, including setting up a clandestine network of chip factories.
Huawei would promote the development of an AI as powerful as GPT4
During his participation in the forum, Liu Qingfeng also revealed that iFlytek is working on a language model that will compete with GPT-4. The model will use Huawei’s new GPU, as well as three company executives who will support its development. According to Qingfeng, the company will carry out a comparison with ChatGPT in October and believes that it will be able to repeat it with GPT-4 during the first half of the year.
iFlytek has experience developing speech recognition software and one of its most popular products is an app to learn chinese with the help of artificial intelligence. In May, the company launched a large-scale cognitive model that allows you to generate textunderstand languages and answer logical, mathematical or code reasoning questions, among others.
China it does not plan to be left behind in the development of artificial intelligence models that compete with OpenAI. After prohibit the use of ChatGPT in all local services, the Government prompted the development of an alternative with controlled information. The first fruit is Ernie Bot, a chatbot developed by Baidu that claims to be more powerful than ChatGPT.
For its part, Alibaba Cloud announced Tongyi Qianwen in April and opened up access for some users and companies. Other companies have made similar presentations, though neither chatbot is publicly available or has a set release date.
If Qingfeng’s statements are true, Huawei could be key in the development of an AI that could cope with OpenAI. The Chinese giant offers artificial intelligence solutions through its brand ascend. One of its most important products is the Atlas 900, a training cluster with thousands of Ascend 910 processors that offers a power equivalent to 500,000 computers.