Alibaba-backed institute achieves “another Sputnik moment” in China’s battle for AI supremacy
Chinese science and technology research institute, Damo Academy – a subsidiary of ecommerce giant Alibaba – has announced that its “Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer” (M6) artificial intelligence (AI) system has increased its number of parameters from 1 trillion to 10 trillion, far exceeding the trillion-level models previously released by Google and Microsoft. According to the announcement, this makes M6 the world’s largest AI pre-training model.
According to the academy, M6 has achieved ultimate low carbon, high efficiency in AI models using 512 graphic processing units (GPU) to train a 10 trillion parameter neural network within ten days. Compared to the GPT-3, a large model released by the OpenAI research laboratory last year, M6 achieved the same parameter scale with only 1% of its energy consumption.
...The Alibaba Damo Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook) is an academically-oriented hybrid research and development facility. It was established in 2017 in Hangzhou – where Alibaba is headquartered – and operates independently from its parent company.
...It aims to create a research ecosystem in China combining cutting-edge technologies (such as quantum technology), breakthroughs in core technologies (such as AI and chips) and the application of key technologies (such as databases).
See the full story here: https://www.railway-technology.com/features/alibaba-backed-institute-achieves-another-sputnik-moment-in-chinas-battle-for-ai-supremacy/
