Latest news with #ZhangYi
Reuters
28-03-2025
- Business
- Reuters
China Construction Bank says it launched internal financial model based on DeepSeek R1
March 28 - China Construction Bank ( opens new tab said on Friday it had completed the private deployment of a large financial model based on DeepSeek R1 earlier this year. Private deployment means for internal use only. The comments were made by the bank's CEO Zhang Yi at a press conference following annual results.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chinese tech giant Tencent restructures AI product portfolio as competition heats up
Tencent Holdings has made sweeping changes to its artificial intelligence (AI) product portfolio, as the Chinese internet giant doubles down on efforts to stay competitive in this fast-developing sector. The Shenzhen-based social-media and video-gaming powerhouse recently incorporated several apps - including QQ Browser, keyboard tool Sogou Pinyin and learning assistant Ima - into the firm's Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG), from their previous home at the Platform & Content Group, according to a report by Chinese digital media outlet The Paper. That followed the previous transfer of AI chatbot Yuanbao to CSIG from the firm's Technology Engineering Group. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. A Tencent representative on Friday confirmed the company's reshuffle of its AI product portfolio. That revamp is expected to help Tencent bolster its AI business amid the rapid developments being pursued by internet peers like Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu, as well as innovative start-ups such as DeepSeek. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The reshuffle reflects a shift in Tencent's AI strategy, as the company sharpens its focus on product experience and user feedback, according to Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at consultancy iiMedia. "Unlike smaller start-ups, Tencent needs to deploy its AI capabilities in various applications for better monetisation opportunities, rather than just going through prolonged testing," Zhang said. Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings is sharpening its focus on artificial intelligence product experience and user feedback, according to consultancy iiMedia. Photo: AFP alt=Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings is sharpening its focus on artificial intelligence product experience and user feedback, according to consultancy iiMedia. Photo: AFP> In a major move by Tencent last week, Weixin - the company's ubiquitous super app, with more than 1.3 billion active users - started to integrate DeepSeek's reasoning model R1 into the app's search bar in a beta test available to some users. "The decision to integrate a third-party artificial intelligence model into its flagship product, despite heavy investment in its own Hunyuan model, signals a more open and user-centric approach to AI," Morningstar analyst Ivan Su said in a research note this week. "Tencent seems to be prioritising functionality and user experience over exclusivity." Some of the apps moved by Tencent to its CSIG unit - including Yuanbao, QQ Browser and Ima - have recently integrated DeepSeek's R1 model to work alongside the company's Hunyuan model. Banking professional Yuri Gu, who lives in southern Guangdong province, said she tried the DeepSeek function on Weixin a few times this week, using the AI model to write up some work reports or simply asking some quirky questions for fun. "It doesn't always come up with the most satisfying answers, but it's still better than DeepSeek's own app that failed to connect all the time," Gu said. DeepSeek's namesake chatbot has experienced some service outages since last month, owing to alleged cyberattacks and amid an influx of new users. Another Guangdong resident, Hugo Lin, also decided to abandon the DeepSeek app owing to the unstable service. Lin switched to Weixin and Yuanbao after these Tencent apps gave him access to the popular DeepSeek product. "It's convenient to ask simple questions to DeepSeek on Weixin, but I'm using Yuanbao more often now because sometimes I have follow-up questions or need it to help me analyse some documents," Lin said. Tencent has continued its efforts to integrate DeepSeek into other products. On Friday, Tencent announced that its work collaboration app, WeCom, is also connected to DeepSeek, which can help enterprise users in customer service. Meanwhile, Tencent is pushing for wider adoption of its proprietary AI models. The company's reasoning model, Hunyuan T1, is touted to rival DeepSeek-R1 in terms of functionality. Hunyuan T1 is also available for free via its Yuanbao app. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
South China Morning Post
23-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
China's Tencent restructures AI product portfolio as competition heats up
Published: 8:30am, 23 Feb 2025 The Shenzhen -based social-media and video-gaming powerhouse recently incorporated several apps – including QQ Browser, keyboard tool Sogou Pinyin and learning assistant Ima – into the firm's Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG), from their previous home at the Platform & Content Group, according to a report by Chinese digital media outlet The Paper. That followed the previous transfer of AI chatbot Yuanbao to CSIG from the firm's Technology Engineering Group. A Tencent representative on Friday confirmed the company's reshuffle of its AI product portfolio. That revamp is expected to help Tencent bolster its AI business amid the rapid developments being pursued by internet peers like Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu , as well as innovative start-ups such as DeepSeek . Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The reshuffle reflects a shift in Tencent's AI strategy, as the company sharpens its focus on product experience and user feedback, according to Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at consultancy iiMedia. 'Unlike smaller start-ups, Tencent needs to deploy its AI capabilities in various applications for better monetisation opportunities, rather than just going through prolonged testing,' Zhang said.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alibaba investors hail e-commerce giant's AI pivot as it plots major investment outlay
E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding's strategic transformation into one of China's leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies has investors all agog, as the Hangzhou-based tech conglomerate ratchets up investment over the next three years in this field. Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares surged 15 per cent to close at HK$138.50 on Friday, following an 8 per cent gain overnight in New York, as the company beat analysts' consensus estimates with better-than-expected profit and revenue in the December quarter, as well as its major tech spending plan. Its New York-listed shares gained another 4 per cent in pre-market trading on Friday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Alibaba's AI strategy is "a bit aggressive, but worthwhile" because it is imperative for the company to win in the AI era, said iiMedia Research founder and chief analyst Zhang Yi. "If Alibaba is not a [major] AI company in the future, it will not be favoured by investors in the capital market." That assessment lends a sense of urgency to the goal set by Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu Yongming on Thursday, when he said the company's next three-year capital outlay on AI and cloud computing infrastructure is expected to exceed what the group has spent over the past decade in building capabilities related to these technologies. JPMorgan analysts, led by Alex Yao, wrote in a research note that Alibaba's commitment shows its "strong confidence in [its] general AI monetisation outlook". The accelerated growth at the firm's Cloud Intelligence Group - with revenue up 13 per cent to 31.7 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion) in the December quarter from a year earlier - already showed investors the potential benefit of betting big on AI. Recent accomplishments by Alibaba Group Holding's cloud computing services and artificial intelligence arm, Alibaba Cloud, are stealing some of the thunder from Chinese AI darling DeepSeek. Photo: Shutterstock alt=Recent accomplishments by Alibaba Group Holding's cloud computing services and artificial intelligence arm, Alibaba Cloud, are stealing some of the thunder from Chinese AI darling DeepSeek. Photo: Shutterstock> The Hang Seng Index ended the week with a 3.8 per cent gain, stretching its winning run to six weeks for the longest streak since January 2023, with start-up DeepSeek's AI breakthrough as catalyst. That AI-triggered market rally saw Alibaba add more than US$110 billion to its market value. Investor excitement for Alibaba has also intensified because of its reported partnership with Apple to support AI features on iPhones in China. In a conference call with analysts on Thursday, Wu said Alibaba will soon release a deep-reasoning AI model built on its Qwen 2.5-Max model, in a move that is expected to offer developers an alternative open-source model to DeepSeek's R1. The start-up is globally recognised for developing advanced open-source AI models, V3 and R1, at a fraction of the cost and computing power that major tech companies typically require for large language model (LLM) projects. LLM is the technology underpinning generative AI services such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek's namesake chatbot. Open source gives public access to a program's source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities. Open-source technologies have been a huge contributor to China's tech industry over the past few decades. Earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family of AI models was credited with the training and development of the world's top 10 open-source LLMs, according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face. Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family of open-source AI models have led to the creation of more than 90,000 models on Hugging Face, the collaborative machine-learning platform and community, according to the company's latest data. Photo: Shutterstock alt=Alibaba Cloud's Qwen family of open-source AI models have led to the creation of more than 90,000 models on Hugging Face, the collaborative machine-learning platform and community, according to the company's latest data. Photo: Shutterstock> Alibaba, which Jack Ma co-founded in 1999, is also sharpening its focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), Wu said on Thursday. AGI refers to an AI system's humanlike intelligence and ability to self-teach, performing tasks that it was not necessarily trained for. The company's plan to double down on AI and cloud computing investment echoes Ma's vision for the technology. In a visit to Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou last December, Ma gave a rare public speech on the 20th anniversary of fintech affiliate Ant Group, when he declared: "AI will change everything." "From today's perspective, the changes that artificial intelligence will bring in the next 20 years will be beyond everyone's imagination, as AI will bring a greater era," he said. In an opinion piece published by the Post last week, Alibaba co-founder and group chairman Joe Tsai pointed out the importance of "real-world implications that drive economic growth" on the back of AI. "Capital will go to companies that innovate with lower costs for training and deploying AI," Tsai wrote. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
South China Morning Post
18-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
AI start-up DeepSeek expands business scope in potential shift towards monetisation
in Beijing Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek has updated its business registry information with key changes to personnel and operational scope, signalling a shift towards monetising its cost-efficient-yet-powerful large language models (LLMs). The Hangzhou-based firm's updated business scope includes 'internet information services', according to business registry service Tianyancha. The move is the first sign of DeepSeek's desire to monetise its popular technology, according to Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at consultancy iiMedia. With eyes on developing a business model, DeepSeek intends to shift away from being purely focused on research and development, Zhang added. 'The move reflects that for a company like DeepSeek, which managed to accumulate technology and develop a product, monetisation is becoming a necessary next step,' Zhang said. DeepSeek's previous business scope said it engages in engineering and AI software development, among others, hinting at a more research-driven approach. DeepSeek's LLMs – the technology underpinning intelligent chatbots such as ChatGPT – were developed and released as open-source models, allowing anyone to freely use and modify them. The company spun out of the hedge fund High-Flyer, which has bankrolled the start-up's rise.
