On the same day, two of China's tech giants, Huawei and Baidu, announced the open-sourcing of their artificial intelligence (AI) large models, reflecting the increasingly fierce competition in China's AI large model ecosystem.
According to reports from Yicai Global and China News Service, Huawei announced on the 30th that it is officially open-sourcing its Pangu 7-billion-parameter dense model, Pangu Pro MoE 72-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, and inference technology based on Ascend, inviting global developers, business partners, and researchers to download and use them.
This marks the first time Huawei has open-sourced its Pangu large model. Huawei stated that this move is another key initiative in implementing its Ascend ecosystem strategy, fostering research and innovation in large model technology, and accelerating the application and value creation of AI across various industries.
On the same day, Baidu, which had previously adhered to a closed-source strategy, also announced the open-sourcing of 10 models from the Wenxin (ERNIE) Large Model 4.5 series, achieving full open-source access to pretrained weights and inference codes.
Since the rise of the AI large model wave, the debate between open-sourcing and closed-sourcing large models has been a hot topic in the industry. The essence of large model open-source is to exchange openness for ecosystem growth and to cultivate technology through the ecosystem. Compared to closed-source, open-source can leverage the power of the global developer community to accelerate the R&D and iteration speed of large models.
Yicai analyzes that in the future, the distinction between open-source and closed-source in the AI model industry may become increasingly blurred. A hybrid approach of "open-source ecosystem + closed-source core" is likely to become the mainstream trend: on one hand, opening up base models to attract developers to participate in ecosystem development; on the other, retaining commercial versions and value-added services.
On another note, Yu Chengdong, Chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, revealed on Monday that Huawei’s new Pura 80 series smartphones will launch an “AI Super Intelligent Agent” in August. At that time, HarmonyOS’s AI assistant “Xiaoyi” will be able to understand user intentions through voice conversations and autonomously complete a series of tasks, including booking flights, purchasing phones, and more.