Issue 42 | Bytedance launches AI bot store, Moonshot AI raises $1B, Lotus ADAS nationwide rollout, 6G satellite launch, Nvidia's ADAS chips ambitions

Welcome to Serica’s weekly tech brief, where we bring you the latest news from one of the world's most dynamic and rapidly evolving tech scenes.

?? Bytedance’s AI bot store launches but falls below expectations

Tiktok owner ByteDance has launched its own AI bot store similar to OpenAI's GPTs as the company seeks to accelerate its AI drive. The Chinese version of Coze, rolled out on Thursday in China where OpenAI's services are not officially available, is described as a "one-stop AI development platform" that allows users to "quickly create a bot without coding" and share across Bytedance’s suite of apps and notably Tencent owned super app WeChat (1.3B+ users). However, it has been undergoing a number of challenges reported by its users during its test phase, which include long testing times (29.9 seconds to write a children’s story), inconsistent responses (sometimes unable to answer basic math questions), and continuous internet outages.

Despite being renowned for its commanding recommendation engines powering apps like TikTok, Douyin, and Toutiao, ByteDance has found itself trailing in the AI race. In response, CEO Liang Rubo has begun a series of restructuring, divestments, and investments to refocus the company and keep pace with its competitors. The in-house developed Chinese version of Coze is different from the international version of Coze, which Bytedance (very quietly through its subsidiaries) launched along with Cici, ChitChop, and BagelBell to international users on OpenAI's GPT technology (accessed through a Microsoft Azure license). These AI chatbots have had millions of downloads and have not had any of the same reported issues as the recently released domestic version of Coze showcasing the uphill race Bytedance - and the Chinese AI industry as a whole - is facing against its US rivals who appear to be far out in front.

SOURCE: China Money Network

?? Moonshot AI raises $1 billion for its long context focused LLM

Moonshot AI, an AI startup founded less than a year ago by Tsinghua graduate Yang Zhilin, has secured a staggering $1 billion in its Series B round. Alibaba, Meituan, and HongShan (formerly Sequoia Capital China) led the investment, propelling the LLM developer to a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion. Moonshot's unique advantage lies in its ability to process and respond to long-form text, an area where they have outpaced the competition demonstrated after the launch of its ‘Kimi’ chatbot last October, which it claimed can process over 200,000 Chinese characters in a single conversation, reportedly eight times the capacity of OpenAI's GPT-4-32K.

The largest single funding round to a Chinese LLM developer comes as big tech companies in China are scrambling to compete in AI domestically and internationally they have replaced US investment firms as the primary backers of China’s most promising LLM developers. Prominent examples include Baichuan, 01.AI, Zhipu, Light Year Ahead, and MiniMax.

Moonshot AI’s success in fundraising can be attributed to the world-class pedigree of its founder, who was a key author of Transformer-XL (a key development in enabling natural language understanding beyond a fixed-length context) and had stints at both Meta AI and Google Brain. Expect more developments, bold moves, and new players to continue to emerge.

SOURCE: 36kr (in Chinese)

??Lotus to launch ADAS across 60 Chinese cities this year

Lotus Technology, the luxury EV division of Lotus Group (owned by Chinese carmaker Geely), is revving up its engines with ambitious plans to put its semi-autonomous driving system into operation across 60 Chinese cities this year. ADAS and other AI-powered offerings are expected to be the next highly competitive arena in the domestic EV wars, which has been locked in an intensive price war for the last 18 months.

The move comes after the company announced it would start delivering its second mass-production EV model to Chinese customers next month, with the aim of carving a niche in the world’s largest automotive market. To fuel these ambitious plans, Lotus Technology successfully raised $880M from its NASDAQ listing (via SPAC merger) months after many of its main domestic competitors raised capital from European car giants and announced similar ADAS rollouts. The next round of the EV wars has officially begun.

SOURCE: SCMP

??? China Mobile launches the world's first 6G test satellite

China Mobile, the world's largest telecom carrier by mobile subscribers, has successfully launched the world's first satellite to test 6G architecture, marking a milestone in its efforts to explore integrated space and ground communication technology. The low-earth-orbit test satellite is the world's first to employ 6G design architecture, and it was launched on Saturday along with another satellite that comes with China Mobile's 5G technology.

The 6G test satellite hosts a distributed autonomous architecture for 6G, which was jointly developed by China Mobile and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Innovation Academy for Microsatellites. Set at an orbit height of approximately 500 kilometers, these experimental satellites offer advantages such as low latency and high data transfer rates compared with high-orbit satellites which travel at 36,000 kilometers. China Mobile said it plans to conduct in-orbit experiments based on these test satellites, accelerating the integration and development of space-to-ground technology industries.

SOURCE: China Daily

?? Nvidia hired ex-Xpeng staff to boost ADAS business in China

Reports suggest that Nvidia has recently recruited several high-profile former employees of Xpeng Motors for its automotive team in China. One of the notable hires is Patrick Liu, who previously served as a director responsible for AI and computer vision at Xpeng until mid-2023. Liu will now be joining Nvidia China as part of the leadership team working on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that are similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta program.

The US chip giant is gearing up to cater to the sharp rise in demand and adoption of ADAS in China by developing more localized chip solutions and enhanced client services. This is one of a number of examples of how Nvidia is balancing US trade sanctions against market opportunities in the world’s second-largest economy.

SOURCE: AutoR (in Chinese)

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