ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, plans to develop its own artificial intelligence model trained with Huawei chips, according to Reuters. U.S. restrictions on the Chinese social media giant are pushing the company even further to China for supplies.
The United States will begin restricting exports of advanced artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies starting in 2022. As a result, ByteDance leaned more towards buying from Chinese suppliers of AI chips.
ByteDance’s next step in the AI ​​race is said to be using Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train a large language model. Apparently, it is currently working on the creation of a new model of artificial intelligence, but it is not yet known whether it will use Huawei chips for this or not.
Bytedance currently mainly uses the Ascend 910B for simpler tasks that involve making predictions with pre-trained AI models. Training artificial intelligence models requires the power to process huge amounts of data, and for now it is only found in powerful and well-known chips, such as those produced by Nvidia.
An informed person in the field of artificial intelligence of Bytedance company says that the complexities and capabilities of the new artificial intelligence of Bytedance, which are measured by computational parameters, are less than the previous artificial intelligence model of Bytedance, namely the Doubao model.
Although a Washington-based TikTok spokesperson said on behalf of ByteDance that no new AI models are under development, the company has ordered more than 100,000 units of the Ascend 910B chip from Huawei and has delivered only 30,000 units as of August. .
Apparently, the limited supply and limited computing power of Huawei chips compared to the more advanced Nvidia chips has prevented Bytedance from setting a timetable for its new AI model.
ByteDance’s current AI technology is used in the Doubao chatbot and the Jimeng text-to-video tool. The company introduced two artificial intelligence models based on Doubao to compete with OpenAI.
ByteDance’s chatbot has grown in popularity since early 2024 and has become one of the most popular apps in China with more than 10 million monthly active users.
ByteDance’s strong emphasis on artificial intelligence has made it one of the biggest buyers of Huawei’s AI chips, and is also the biggest buyer of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip. Nvidia develops this chip considering the limitations of the United States and specifically for the Chinese market.
