(Yicai Global) June 29 -- An affiliate of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has released a large language model platform called Volcano Ark to piggyback off LLMs developed by other firms.

Volcano Ark, developed by Volcengine, helps enterprises evaluate and fine-tune LLMs made by others and make reasoning based on live data, the cloud service provider said in a press conference yesterday.

The new product is compatible with several LLMs, including Baichuan Intelligent, established by Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan, Mobvoi, invested by Google, and MOSS, developed by Fudan University.

The emerging industry lacks a marketplace online. However, Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said recently that the creator of ChatGPT is considering launching an app store for artificial intelligence products. Moreover, Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings announced earlier this month that it will build an app store for LLMs on Tencent Cloud.

In the future, the AI industry will consolidate so using general-purpose LLMs developed by industry giants will be expensive whereas deploying those of small and medium-sized manufacturers will be relatively affordable, so Volcano Ark aims to provide low-cost services by aggregating different products, Tan Dai, president of Volcengine, said to Yicai Global.

Different models vary in performing specific tasks, and enterprises should comprehensively evaluate and choose the more cost-effective models in different scenarios based on their own business needs, per Wu Di, head of Volcengine’s algorithm.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Emmi Laine