(Yicai Global) Feb. 28 -- Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings has set up a project team to develop HunyuanAide, its own ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence bot, and to advance special research, including pre-trained models.

The team has carried out large AI model research in multiple fields, covering natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal information processing, Yicai Global learned from Tencent yesterday. It is led by Zhang Zhengyou, the Shenzhen-based company’s chief scientist and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

HunyuanAide recently launched a pre-trained model, the HunYuan-NLP-1T, used for natural language processing and achieved a breakthrough in Chinese comprehension while being low-cost and inclusive, Tencent said. The model was applied in the advertising, search, and dialogue functions of the firm’s products, it added.

The HunyuanAide team will further explore larger model parameters and build a more powerful big AI model with multimodal information from audio, image, and video, Tencent pointed out.

AI startup OpenAI launched ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, last November and has tens of millions of daily users. Global tech giants have followed suit, announcing research and development in the field and plans to create similar products.

US search engine titan Google launched its chatbot, called Bard, early this month, while China’s Baidu plans to debut its Ernie Bot next month. Other tech firms, including Alibaba Group Holding and NetEase, recently said they are investing in AI bots.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev