🥰 AI Game on Delighting Romantic Partners, US Tightens Cloud Access for Foreign AI, and Baidu ERNIE Integrated into Samsung Smartphones

Weekly China AI News from January 22, 2024 to January 28, 2024

Jan 31, 2024

Hello readers, in this issue, I will discuss a game that teaches you how to delight your romantic AI partner if you mess up. The Biden administration has released a draft rule intended to restrict cloud access for foreign entities, especially from China, in training LLMs. In other news, Baidu has partnered with Samsung to incorporate its ERNIE AI into Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones in China.

Viral Game Coaches on Delighting Romantic AI Partners

What’s New: A relationship coach game that uses LLM to simulate couple arguments quickly became a hit in China, drawing in an impressive 600,000 users within a single day.

How it Works: Named 哄哄模拟器 (Appeasing Simulator in literal translations), the game operates like a role-playing game. Users are presented with various scenarios where they’ve upset their virtual partner, powered by LLM. The objective is to navigate these situations and increase their “Forgiveness Score”. With scenarios ranging from forgetting anniversaries to handling late arrivals on dates, the LLM will simulate a response and measure how well your reply fares in patching things up. The higher your Forgiveness Score, the better you’re deemed at resolving conflicts.

For example, you’ve canceled a vacation plan last minute.

Good answer: Thank you, my dear, for your understanding. I’m also feeling down suddenly. There have been some unexpected changes on the client’s side. I’m so sorry about the trip you’ve been looking forward to for so long. Once the project is finished next weekend, I’ll take two days of annual leave to spend with you.

Or, you hung up on your girlfriend’s call after dozing off in the middle of the night, and she ignored you the next day.

Bad answer: Why did you ignore me on WeChat?

The game is available on mobile apps and the web. Users get 10 free answers per scenario, after which they need to pay RMB12 per month.

One more thing: Developed by a solo programmer, the game went viral organically without promotion and advertising. Its popularity spread rapidly on Tencent’s QQ channels, which currently operate like Discord. The majority of its users are teenagers and college students.

U.S. Mandates Cloud Firms to Report Foreign Entities Training LLMs

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud: The Big Three Compared

What’s New: The U.S. Commerce Department has drafted a proposal requiring American cloud computing companies to report whenever a foreign entity uses its resources to train AI models, Bloomberg reported.

How it Works: The draft requires U.S. cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud, to disclose when non-U.S. entities utilize their services for training LLMs that reach a certain level of scale.

This action follows recent steps taken by the U.S. to limit China’s ability to train frontier models. Over the past two years, the U.S. has imposed severe restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors, including Nvidia’s top-tier GPUs.

Why it Matters: This draft rule, which asks for comments through April 29, reflects the ongoing tech competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. sees China’s advances in AI and other next-generation technologies as a significant strategic challenge. By tightening controls over cloud access, the U.S. aims to prevent China from circumventing existing semiconductor restrictions and accessing or developing advanced AI models.

My Two Cents: The proposed rule primarily serves as an additional measure to close potential loopholes in the existing chip export controls, though its overall effect might be limited (open to other opinions).

Large tech companies in China are probably not going to feel much impact since they have already stockpiled chips and relied on their data centers to train LLMs. Smaller startups might turn to local cloud services for AI model training, rather than opting for AWS and Microsoft Azure.
The majority of Chinese firms exploring overseas business are unlikely to be affected. They typically rely on GPT API or Gemini, rather than training a LLM from scratch.

Baidu Integrates ERNIE AI into Samsung’s Galaxy 24 in China

What’s New: Samsung Electronics China and Baidu AI Cloud announced a strategic partnership on AI ecosystems last week. Baidu’s ERNIE model has been integrated into Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S24 Series.

How it Works: The integration of ERNIE into Samsung’s mobile AI, particularly the Galaxy AI, equips the S24 Series with capabilities like intelligent summarization, sophisticated typesetting, and real-time call translation.

The upgraded Samsung Note Assistant, powered by ERNIE, can now translate and condense lengthy content into concise, well-structured formats with a simple click.
The S24 Series’ built-in AI supports real-time speech-to-text transcription, speaker differentiation, multi-language translation, and automatic generation of meeting minutes.
The S24’s Circle to Search feature enables intuitive searches across texts, images, or videos using simple hand gestures, getting results from Baidu Search.

Why it Matters: Following Samsung’s moves, other major international brands might opt for local LLMs like Baidu’s ERNIE to incorporate generative AI features in the Chinese market. Local LLMs are better at processing Chinese language prompts and have already secured regulatory approval. China has approved over 40 AI models for public use in the past six months, Reuters reported.

Weekly News Roundup

🌐 Alibaba Cloud has upgraded its Qwen-VL visual understanding to the Max version. The new model is capable of recognizing people in images, answering questions, creating content, and coding.

🤖 A total of 14 LLMs have been approved for public use in China, including the ones from Xiaomi, 4Paradigm, and 01.AI.

📊 Alibaba’s search app Quark launches AI PPT. Users can generate professional slide documents in seconds.

🎬 ByteDance’s video editing software Jianying, the Chinese equvalent of Capcut, begins small-scale testing of its voice cloning feature.

🐜 Ant Group has established an internal AI innovation and application department, NextEvo, led by Vice President Xu Peng.

🚗 China FAW collaborates with Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen to develop GPT-BI, a large model application boosting FAW’s digital transformation.

💡 Tencent Research Institute has unveiled its top ten technology application trends for 2024, including high-performance computing convergence, multimodal agents advancing AGI, AI accelerating humanoid robot evolution, AI+ genetics decoding life, digital interaction engines, immersive media creating 3D presence, brain-computer interfaces moving from medical breakthroughs to interaction revolutions, star-to-earth communication enhancing network coverage, eVTOL advancing aerial transport, and real-time multi-energy flow reshaping virtual power plants.