Advertisement
Singapore markets closed

  • Straits Times Index

    3,332.80
    -10.55 (-0.32%)
     

  • Nikkei

    39,583.08
    +241.54 (+0.61%)
     

  • Hang Seng

    17,718.61
    +2.14 (+0.01%)
     

  • FTSE 100

    8,164.12
    -15.56 (-0.19%)
     

  • Bitcoin USD

    60,622.56
    -860.98 (-1.40%)
     

  • CMC Crypto 200

    1,263.65
    -20.18 (-1.57%)
     

  • S&P 500

    5,460.48
    -22.39 (-0.41%)
     

  • Dow

    39,118.86
    -45.20 (-0.12%)
     

  • Nasdaq

    17,732.60
    -126.08 (-0.71%)
     

  • Gold

    2,336.90
    +0.30 (+0.01%)
     

  • Crude Oil

    81.46
    -0.28 (-0.34%)
     

  • 10-Yr Bond

    4.3430
    +0.0550 (+1.28%)
     

  • FTSE Bursa Malaysia

    1,590.09
    +5.15 (+0.32%)
     

  • Jakarta Composite Index

    7,063.58
    +95.63 (+1.37%)
     

  • PSE Index

    6,411.91
    +21.33 (+0.33%)
     

Tencent launches Yuanbao AI assistant app as internet giant moves to close gap with other Chinese chatbots

South China Morning Post
·3-min read

Tencent Holdings on Thursday launched an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot app called Yuanbao, as the video gaming and social media giant races to catch up with other Chinese technology companies in developing applications to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Yuanbao can be used to analyse and summarise documents, provide questions and answers, and generate texts and images, similar to the functions of ChatGPT and alternative Chinese AI chatbots.

Tencent's AI assistant was built on the company's own large language model (LLM) - the technology behind ChatGPT and other generative AI services - known as Hunyuan.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

ADVERTISEMENT

Hunyuan has been in a continuous process of enhancement over the past year and is now a trillion-parameter model, Tencent said on Thursday. An LLM is a deep-learning algorithm, trained on mountains of raw data from the internet, that can be adapted to accomplish tasks in various AI applications.

Tencent Holdings' Yuanbao artificial intelligence assistant is now available in app stores on the mainland. Photo: Weibo alt=Tencent Holdings' Yuanbao artificial intelligence assistant is now available in app stores on the mainland. Photo: Weibo>

The launch of Yuanbao shows Tencent's confidence to somehow close the gap with Chinese tech firms' that have had a head start in building ChatGPT-like services, including Baidu, ByteDance and Moonshot AI.

Yuanbao's search results, for example, are accessible to the vast content ecosystem of Tencent's WeChat. The multipurpose super app has a publishing platform called Official Accounts where creators can post articles and information, but this content is not accessible to search engines like Baidu or Google.

Although the Yuanbao app's release comes several months behind its peers, it follows Tencent's strategy. Company founder, chairman and chief executive Pony Ma Huateng previously said the firm would adopt a more measured pace in developing generative AI products.

This month, Tencent launched an upgraded version of its Hunyuan LLM that provides text-to-image generation that is open source for enterprises and individuals. The company also slashed prices of its AI model to join a full-fledged LLM price war in the domestic market.

The Yuanbao artificial intelligence chatbot is the latest consumer-oriented app from Tencent Holdings. Photo: Weibo alt=The Yuanbao artificial intelligence chatbot is the latest consumer-oriented app from Tencent Holdings. Photo: Weibo>

Tencent, however, has much ground to cover. ByteDance, for example, has said that its Doubao app has amassed more than 26 million monthly active users, while Baidu last month claimed 200 million users for Ernie Bot.

Subject to strict censorship rules, Chinese AI chatbots tend to avoid or stick to official lines in response to sensitive political questions. Yuanbao, for example, processed and responded to questions regarding democracy on the mainland and Taiwan with textbook answers, similar to results from Baidu's Ernie Bot and Moonshot AI's Kimi, according to tests conducted by the South China Morning Post on Thursday.

When asked to provide a summary of Chinese President Xi Jinping's book The Governance of China, Yuanbao was able to provide a 1,000-word essay with several key points from the book. The other chatbots seemed more reluctant to respond to questions that mention the names of the country's political leaders.

Kimi started processing related articles for a few seconds and then suggested to "change another topic and chat more". Ernie Bot, meanwhile, gave a brief introduction of the book and then closed the input box, so the user can start a new conversation.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.