US-Banned Server Firm Releases World's Largest AI Model; Alibaba Reaches One Million Driverless Deliveries; Alleged Plagiarism on a NeurIPS Submitted Paper
China’s AI news in the week of October 3, 2021
Inspur Flexes Muscles in Ultra-Large AI Model With 245.7 Billion Parameters
The creation of GPT-3 in 2020 has stimulated a global race of building massive AI models, a prime reflection of both algorithm advancements and robust compute infrastructure. Inspur, the world’s third-largest server provider, has recently jumped on the bandwagon and unveiled Yuan (源) 1.0, an AI model with 245.7 billion parameters that is said to be the world’s largest AI model.
Trained on a Chinese corpus of 5000 GB text data, Yuan 1.0 has writing aptitude through its ability to compose novels, lyrics, news, and stories. The total amount of compute used to train the single model is 4095 petaflop/s-days. The model claims the top spot in two benchmark tests - few-shot learning and zero-shot learning - on the CLUE Leaderboard, the Chinese counterpart of GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) that encompasses 14 sub-tasks from language understanding to classification.
Inspur AI Research Institute, the research wing of the company, said Yuan 1.0 will be opened up to the academic community and industry users to lower the threshold of massive AI models. The associated paper, API, or code is not publicly available yet.
Founded in 1945, Inspur ranked first among all the Chinese x86 server providers in terms of revenue, with a market share of 35.6% in 2020. The company is the world’s third-largest server vendor with a market share of 9.6%. Despite its commercial success, the company faced a major hurdle last year as the US Department of Defense added Inspur to its entity list, which bars listed companies from doing business with American suppliers without obtaining a license.
Alibaba’s Driverless Robots Deliver 1 Million Orders in One Year
The embattled Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba celebrated a milestone of its autonomous vehicle deployment - 200 driverless robots delivered one million packages within one year of launch.
Dubbed Xiaomanlv, the vehicle can drive roughly 62 miles on a single charge with a maximum speed of ~12 mph and carry up to 100 kilograms or 50 packages at one time. Equipped with two LiDARs, six cameras, and other sensors, the robot can navigate its way more than 99.9% of the time without human intervention.
Such 200 vehicles will be expanded to 10,000 robots over the next three years to deliver one million orders per day, the company’s research wing Damo Academy said.
Alibaba has been doubling down on autonomous driving technology to alleviate its pressured logistics system amid the rise of e-commerce. Last year, the company started piloting Xiaomanlv robots across China’s university campuses and communities.
Other retailers in China like JD.com and Meituan are also armoring with self-driving capabilities to meet the growing demand for instant deliveries. In April, JD.com, Meituan, and Neolix received permits from Beijing authorities to trial self-driving delivery vehicles in designated parts of the Yizhuang Development Area, a state-level economic and technological development zone.
Two Groups of Researchers Accuses One Paper of Plagiarism. What Happened?
Plagiarism is disgraceful, but the story below to be told is actually embarrassing while pretty interesting.
A week ago, Reddit user ‘u/chuong98’ complained his paper Improving Object Detection by Label Assignment Distillation (Paper A), which was published on August 24 and still under conference review, was severely plagiarized by the paper Label Assignment Distillation for Object Detection (Paper B), which was published on September 16.
Meanwhile, a few days before the Reddit post was created, Wang Jianfeng, a research scientist from Chinese facial tech upstart Megvii, coincidently accused Paper B of plagiarizing his unpublished paper Label Assignment Distillation for Object Detection (Paper C), which was submitted to NeurIPS 2020 and AAAI 2021 but received rejection and never released to the public yet. According to Wang, Paper B was literally copied from Paper C, word for word with minor changes.
Paper A: Improving Object Detection by Label Assignment Distillation, Chuong H. Nguyen, Thuy C. Nguyen, Tuan N. Tang, Nam L.H. Phan: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10520
Paper B: Label Assignment Distillation for Object Detection, Gao, M., Zhang, H. and Yan, Y., 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07843
Paper C, Megvii: Label Assignment Distillation for Object Detection
Shocked, baffled, and furious, Wang reached out to Paper B authors asking how they got access to Paper C that remained private to the public except original authors and peer reviewers (who were later proved to be innocent). He received a response from Zhang H., a graduate candidate of Beijing Institute of Technology. Zhang apologized but denied plagiarism. After multiple rounds of unpleasant exchanges, Wang reported the case to the Beijing Institute of Technology.
The university quickly conducted a thorough investigation and made an announcement on September 30 that Paper C is plagiarism and Zhang H. has committed acts of severe academic misconduct.
So how did Zhang and his peers get access to the paper? According to Wang on Reddit, the Paper C pdf file was made public within the company but illegally downloaded by a former intern who transferred the pdf to latex and submitted it to a conference. “The intern plagiarized our paper with no doubt. His PhD supervisor found the submission and requested him to withdraw it (without knowing the plagiarism). He did it, then he gave it to the first author of Paper B…Days ago, the first author found Paper A on arXiv, and decided to publish Paper B with CVPR 2021 latex template on arXiv.”
Okay, so what about Paper A? Turns out the two papers shared very similar ideas but found no evidence of plagiarism. Case closed. Now both Paper A and Paper C authors wanted to cool down the incident and focus on their work.
Investment News:
Glassix, a Beijing-based startup specialized in deep learning and computer vision, has raised RMB tens of millions of yuan in its Series A funding round at a valuation of RMB 700 million yuan ($108 million). The investment was led by China Risun Group, the world’s largest coking enterprise. Founded in 2014, the company aims to transform traditional industries with AI solutions and services.
Mech-Mind Robotics, a Beijing-based AI industrial robotics company, has raised almost RMB 1 billion yuan ($155 million) in its Series C funding round led by Meituan and IDG Capital. Founded in 2016, the company focuses on R&D, production, and sales for 3D vision hardware and software products, aiming at putting intelligence into industrial robots.
Zhuiyi.ai, a Shenzhen-based AI company that provides a one-stop platform for AI digital workforce production and management, has completed new funding led by CICC, following fundraising of RMB hundreds of millions of yuan in June. Founded in 2016, Zhuiyi.ai builds AI digital workforce, like intelligent bots and digital avatars, to serve organizations and individuals.