(Yicai Global) April 27 -- China Telecom, one of the country’s big three state-owned telecom firms, is developing its own ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence model, the general manager of its cloud computing services unit said.

The industrial AI model has entered the internal testing stage and will be launched soon, Tianyi Cloud Technology’s Hu Zhiqiang said when giving an update on the firm’s latest research and development progress at the China Telecom 2023 Cloud Ecology Conference held yesterday.

Beijing-based China Telecom will provide services to enterprise users in the future in terms of AI model production, as well as technical services and management of large models, Hu said.

China Telecom is the first state-owned telecoms provider to publicly announce its own development of a ChatGPT-like AI model. Some private tech giants, including Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding, and 360 Security Technology, have already revealed their own R&D efforts in the area, which is drawing increasing interest.

Telecom carriers have an innate advantage in the field of AI technology development because they already have computing power infrastructure, including data centers and cloud computing platforms, analyst Fu Liang told Yicai Global.

Since they can develop ChatGPT-like AI model services for themselves, they can also provide computing power support for similar projects by their enterprise customers, Fu added.

But with a large number of competitors entering the arena, an industry insider told Yicai Global that the key to the success of pre-trained large AI models depends on adapting to market demand.

“At present, the application scenarios for ChatGPT are only some prototypes,” the person said. “How to commercialize it in the future needs further exploration.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Tom Litting