South China Morning Post reported that a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, founded a year ago by a former vice-president at Microsoft, is betting on so-called "scaling law" to enhance its AI capabilities, despite the difficulties in obtaining advanced chips.
China's demand for higher computing power will be never ending amid the generative AI boom, Zhu Yibo, head of systems at AI start-up StepFun, or Jieyue Xingchen in Chinese, said at a media briefing in Shanghai last 20 June 2024. "Computing power, systems, data, and algorithms are the cores in the pursuit of the scaling law," he added.
StepFun, founded by Microsoft Asia Research Institute's former chief scientist Jiang Daxin in 2023, is one of the many Chinese AI start-ups trying to catch up with US peers in AI computing power. It has launched the Step-1V multimodal large language model (LLM) with over 100 billion parameters, and it is testing the Step-2V model that boasts over one trillion parameters.
The paper added that the push for greater computing power stems from a belief in the scaling law, which states that as the size of a model and its training data increases, the model's performance improves. However, Chinese AI start-ups face the common challenge of restricted access to the most advanced AI chips from US supplier Nvidia, making their quest more difficult.
StepFun's computing centre under development in Shanghai is expected to be one of China's leading AI facilities, according to the company. When asked about the impact of Washington's export restrictions on AI chips to China, Zhu said the challenges were "manageable", without elaborating.
The company has become one of the most recognised AI players in China, partly thanks to the experience of its founder. Jiang worked at Microsoft for 16 years, leading projects such as the Bing search engine, the intelligent voice assistant Cortana, Azure cognitive services, and natural language understanding systems for Microsoft 365.
The other founders, Zhu and Jiao Binxing, shared working experiences at Microsoft.
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