China claimed to train an artificial intelligence model with 1 trillion parameters

State-owned operator China Telecom claims to have been able to train 2 large language models (LLMs) entirely using chips made in China. It seems that one of these models has a trillion parameters.

According to SCMP news agency, China Telecom’s Artificial Intelligence Institute recently announced in a statement that it has developed 2 artificial intelligence models, one of which is called TeleChat2-115B, but the name of the second model has not been announced. It is said that these models are trained on tens of thousands of native chips. Also in this statement, it is stated that China has been able to become self-sufficient in the development and training of large language models.

Due to US sanctions, China has focused on indigenous chips

According to China Telecom’s claim, the company’s unnamed artificial intelligence model has one trillion parameters. The parameter means the number of variables in the artificial intelligence system during training. The complexity and effectiveness of the artificial intelligence model largely depends on the scale of the parameters involved in the training process. Also, China Telecom claims that TeleChat2-115B supports more than 100 billion parameters.

More details of these artificial intelligence models have not been published yet, and it has not even been said which company provided the chip used in it. Considering that Huawei is one of the old partners of China Telecom, Huawei was probably the supplier of artificial intelligence chips for this project.

It seems that the semiconductor industry has become the new ground of competition between the US and China. The US government plans to block China’s access to advanced chip manufacturing technologies by imposing sanctions. On the other hand, a major part of the Chinese chip market is monopolized by Nvidia, and this company has recently limited the export of some of its products to this Asian country due to US sanctions.

In such a situation, the Chinese government encourages domestic companies to produce chips domestically to reduce reliance on foreign chips. Huawei is one of the pioneers in the production of artificial intelligence chips in China and has recently started the production of native Asend 910C chips to replace Nvidia chips.