China telcos following their own path to AI

After a pause while the government introduced new rules, Chinese generative AI services are now hitting the market.

Tencent became the latest to join the wave Thursday with the release of its Hunyuan foundational model.

China's biggest and most advanced AI chatbot, Baidu's Ernie Bot, was downloaded 2.4 million times and fielded 33 million queries on its first day last week. Bytedance, Alibaba, and a number of startups are also testing out AI chatbots.

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(Source: Pitinan Piyavatin/Alamy Stock Photo)

To do so they all have had to run the gauntlet of China's new AI regulations, which require public chatbots to receive government approval before release.

China's big three telcos are also bringing their own distinctive approach to AI. Each has constructed an AI platform capable of being customized for different verticals.

China Mobile says its Jiutian platform is focused on smart network scenarios and, following an upgrade earlier this year, now offers 830 industrial-scale applications in 27 segments.

Its latest release has been a government affairs model and a customer service model aimed at supporting delivery of government services – priorities for a state-owned telco in a socialist state, Shanghai Security News reported.

"While we are empowering our main business, I believe that the computing power, data, environment, and algorithms accumulated by Jiutian will also be used to empower all industries," said China Mobile Research Institute chief scientist Feng Junlan.

6G will be native AI

Feng told an AI conference in July the aim of Jiutian was to make AI a native capability of China Mobile's next generation network and support "the digital intelligence transformation."

China Telecom is offering its Galaxy AI platform, with 5,500 self-developed algorithms. Its Galaxy General Vision Model 2.0 has tens of billions of parameters. Its new Telechat platform is a large-scale industry model that is being integrated with industry verticals to support thousands of scenarios.

Number three telco China Unicom has just unveiled its first AI model, known as the Honghu Graphic Model, a large vertical industry model designed for value-added telecom services.

These kinds of externally facing AI platforms are a long way from the kind of AI commonly being discussed and deployed by telcos elsewhere. For the most part, the industry is seeing AI as means of optimizing performance and managing complex networks.

China operators are no doubt deploying AI in this way as well, but they are choosing to publicize their cloud AI platforms to demonstrate their support for national digital strategy.

For the wider telecom industry, AI will play a critical role in future wireless networks, analyst firm Counterpoint Research said.

"With the transition to 5G, wireless systems have become increasingly complex and more challenging to manage, forcing the wireless industry to think beyond traditional rules-based design methods," it said in a research note.

It said wireless AI would become a pillar of 5G Advanced and be essential for end-to-end (E2E) network design and optimization.

It predicts wireless AI will become native and all-pervasive in 6G, operating autonomously between devices and networks and across all protocols and network layers.

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— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading