(Yicai Global) May 29 -- Beijing and Guangdong are at the forefront of China's research and development of large language models, according to a recent report by the science and technology ministry.

Entities based in the nation’s capital city and the southern province have released a total of 28 and 20 LLMs respectively, the Ministry of Science and Technology said in a report published yesterday at the Artificial Intelligence Big Model Development Forum held in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech hub, which is also known as 'China's Silicon Valley.'

Most of China's LLMs focus on the field of natural language processing, followed by multimodal AI and less common models such as computer vision and intelligent voice, according to the report. They are mainly developed by universities, scientific research institutes, companies, and other innovative entities. Only a few are developed by tie-ups between universities and businesses.

More than half of China's LLMs are already open-source, most of which were created by universities and scientific research institutes. Tsinghua University’s ChatGLM-6B, Fudan Universit’s Moss, and Baidu’s Ernie Bot are the top three in terms of open-source influence, the report said.

China is accelerating the use of LLMs in work, daily life, and entertainment, but also in the medical, industrial, and educational fields. Professional-oriented LLMs, such as those for biopharmaceuticals, remote sensing, meteorology, and other vertical fields, also provide solutions for specific scenarios.

“In terms of the distribution of big models released around the world, China and the United States are ahead, accounting for more than 80 percent of the global total," said Zhao Zhiyun, director of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China and head of the team that wrote the report.

“The US ranked first in recent years, while China entered a period of rapid development in 2020 and is currently maintaining a similar growth trend as the US,” noted Zhao, who is also director of the Research and Development Center for New Generation AI at the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Editor: Futura Costaglione