“Upgrades to OpenAI’s GPT series, which powers ChatGPT, as well as substantial investments in supercomputing centers by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, all validate the effectiveness of scaling laws,” Jiang said at a conference on Saturday. “In the future, issues such as data availability, human resources, and concerns about return on investment could impact the pace of scaling laws.”
Yet few Chinese AI companies have so far been able to match U.S. tech giants in terms of spending on LLMs, and many have sought to develop customer-facing applications that can generate revenue.
Since its establishment in April 2023, Stepfun has focused on the development of fundamental models. At WAIC, it officially launched Step-2, a trillion-parameter LLM, as well as the Step-1.5V multi-modal model and Step-1X image generation model.
“Besides scaling laws, multimodality is also crucial for building a global model,” Jiang said.
World models are those that allow us to develop internal representations of external environments by processing visual and other types of data. Stepfun aims to unify generative and understanding capabilities within a single model, according to Jiang.
The company also operates consumer-facing products, including a ChatGPT-like personal assistant called Yuewen and Maopaoya, an AI companion that takes on the personalities of specific characters.
“Global investment in AI reached $22.4 billion last year, with 70% to 80% going to companies developing large models,” said Alex Zhou Zhifeng, managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, at another WAIC side event. Qiming was one of Stepfun’s early investors.
Zhou mentioned that in the near future, there will be more investment in AI applications, which benefit from the lower cost of tokens. In AI, a token is a fundamental unit of data that is processed by algorithms.
Peng Wensheng, an economist at China International Capital, said at the event that China’s AI model market size is expected to reach about 5.2 trillion yuan ($715.1 billion) by 2030. The industrial AI market size will be about 9.4 trillion yuan, he added.
