The international competition heats up

Chinese startup MiniMax, working on AI solutions similar to that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is close to completing a fundraising of more than $250 million that will value it at about $1.2 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

The deal comes amid a global AI buzz kicked off by ChatGPT that has spread to China, shoring up stocks in artificial intelligence firms and prompting a flurry of domestic companies, such as Alibaba (9988.HK), Huawei (HWT.UL), and Baidu (9888.HK), to announce rival products.

Here is the link.  And here is a Chinese professor from Fudan, critical of all the money being poured into LLM research in China, comparing it to Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

You have to be very critical of all sources from China, no matter what they say.  Still, in terms of expected value I know what is the correct bet here, namely that China is a current and very active competitor in this arena, even if they are behind America so far.

Then there is the open source model Falcon, which is receiving very good reviews from multiple sources, such as this:

Falcon is a new family of very high-quality (and fully open-source!) LLMs that just made it to the top of the leaderboards.

Here's the "small" 7B version running on my mac with Core ML at ~4.3 tokens per second 🤯 pic.twitter.com/B1y4tyGzXA

— Pedro Cuenca (@pcuenq) June 2, 2023

If you don’t already know, Falcon is from…the UAE.  Get the picture?