OpenAI's Biggest Rival Nobody Openly Talks About?

What is the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)

Welcome Back!

This is going to be a very short piece. Outside of the spotlight of Western tech media, where Microsoft and Alphabet are multi Trillion dollar companies, a lot of real work is taking place for the future.

One of those places is the Beijing academy of artificial intelligence (BAAI). Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence(BAAI) is a private non-profit organization engaged in AI research and development. They say they aim to empower technologies to benefit people and the planet. Hint, the CCP always wants that.

In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia Brad Smith of Microsoft went on the record, and literally named them as their likely #3 competitor:

When it comes to A.I. research in recent years China has been very impressive. If not in the quality of the work, in the quantity. As good as China BigTech like ByteDance, Baidu are, BAAI may be in yet another league. China also has SenseTime, Tencent, Alibaba and dozens of others working on LLMs and how best to leverage Generative A.I.

• WuDao is the world largest pre-trained language model to date. The model was trained with FastMoE, a Fast Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) training system developed by BAAI itself, on 1.75 trillion parameters. (It is believed GPT-4 is around 1 trillion parametres).