Chair of iFlytek Liu Qingfeng told employees that the Chinese voice-recognition company has “resisted the extreme pressure from the US” and is entering “a new period of strategic opportunity,” at his firm’s annual general meeting. Speaking on Tuesday, Liu again benchmarked iFlytek’s upgraded Spark against GPT-4 Turbo, saying it expects to be as powerful as OpenAI’s most advanced model in the first half of 2024.
Why it matters: Liu’s confident tone throughout his speech is being seen as a sign that the company seems to have passed its dark days in the grip of US sanctions due to its “seizing of the strategic opportunity of large language models.”
Details: In his speech, Liu stated that the top goals for iFlytek in 2024 would be to be the fastest Chinese company to catch up with GPT-4, to “empower 10 million intelligent hardware terminals”, to produce “industry-leading applications taking the largest market share in six industries including education and finance”, and to “amass one million LLM developers to build an AI model ecosystem”.
- Liu’s address on Tuesday emphasized the importance of building “independent and controllable” home-grown AI foundation models, with the exec saying LLMs are a battlefield for gaining strategic advantage over the US.
- However, the company’s financial forecast offers a glimpse into the huge cost of achieving China’s ChatGPT alternative, with iFlytek’s net profit excluding extraordinary profit and loss expected to be down 71% to 81% to between RMB 80 million and RMB 120 million ($11.3 million to $16.9 million) in 2023 compared to the previous year iFlytek has claimed this is largely due to “firm investment” in core technology and industrial chain localization substitution.
- iFlytek also projected an up to 7% increase in revenue to RMB 20 billion for its financial year ending Dec. 31.
- iFlytek unveiled its Spark iteration model on Jan. 30, claiming it as the first such model to be built on the AI model training platform the company designed in cooperation with Huawei and which uses the Chinese telecom giant’s AI chips.
Context: The US government blacklisted A-share listed iFlytek in Oct. 2019, meaning China’s top artificial intelligence company was banned from buying critical components from US companies without US government approval.
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