Chinese language state-owned provider China Telecom has introduced the event of two LLMs educated totally on domestically produced chips.
In an announcement from the Institute of AI at China Telecom, printed on WeChat and reported by the South China Morning Submit, its open-source TeleChat2-115B, which has over 100 billion parameters, and a second unnamed mannequin, which reportedly has 1 trillion parameters, had been educated utilizing tens of 1000’s of regionally manufactured chips.
The assertion claims that this growth “signifies that China has really realized whole self-sufficiency in home LLM coaching,” a difficult objective for the nation because the US imposed strict export rules that block entry to high-end GPUs just like the Nvidia H100 and A100.
Turning to native suppliers
Whereas China Telecom hasn’t specified who equipped the chips used to coach its LLMs, it’s doubtless that Huawei offered the bulk, if not all of them. The corporate has been positioning itself as a home various to Nvidia, and the South China Morning Submit notes that China Telecom “beforehand disclosed that it’s creating LLM know-how utilizing Ascend chips developed by the Shenzhen-based telecom gear large.”
Huawei has lately begun sending samples of its new Ascend 910C processor to Chinese language server and telecom firms for testing, and it has been focusing on main Nvidia prospects in China within the hopes of getting them to change a minimum of a few of their enterprise.
Though there’s a thriving black market in China for Nvidia’s high-end GPUs, many firms, together with ByteDance and Alibaba, desire to remain compliant and use lower-spec, permitted GPUs like Nvidia’s H20 to keep away from authorized and reputational dangers and to take care of entry to Nvidia’s help. These firms are more and more turning to Huawei for his or her AI wants. It was lately reported that TikTok proprietor ByteDance had put in an order for 100,000 Ascend processors.
The South China Morning Submit additionally experiences that, along with Huawei, China Telecom is exploring {hardware} from Cambricon, an area AI chip start-up, to additional diversify its chip provide.
