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China AI Hardware

China Trained a 1-Trillion-Parameter LLM Using Only Domestic Chips (theregister.com) 52

Posted by EditorDavid from the in-the-chips dept.
"China Telecom, one of the largest wireless carriers in mainland China, says that it has developed two large language models (LLMs) relying solely on domestically manufactured AI chips..." reports Tom's Hardware. "If the information is accurate, this is a crucial milestone in China's attempt at becoming independent of other countries for its semiconductor needs, especially as the U.S. is increasingly tightening and banning the supply of the latest, highest-end chips for Beijing in the U.S.-China chip war." Huawei, which has mostly been banned from the U.S. and other allied countries, is one of the leaders in China's local chip industry... If China Telecom's LLMs were indeed fully trained using Huawei chips alone, then this would be a massive success for Huawei and the Chinese government.
The project's GitHub page "contains a hint about how China Telecom may have trained the model," reports the Register, "in a mention of compatibility with the 'Ascend Atlas 800T A2 training server' — a Huawei product listed as supporting the Kunpeng 920 7265 or Kunpeng 920 5250 processors, respectively running 64 cores at 3.0GHz and 48 cores at 2.6GHz. Huawei builds those processors using the Arm 8.2 architecture and bills them as produced with a 7nm process."

The South China Morning Post says the unnamed model has 1 trillion parameters, according to China Telecom, while the TeleChat2t-115B model has over 100 billion parameters.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
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China Trained a 1-Trillion-Parameter LLM Using Only Domestic Chips More

China Trained a 1-Trillion-Parameter LLM Using Only Domestic Chips

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  • 100 billion != 1 trillion (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday October 06, 2024 @02:55AM (#64843425)

    China trains 100-billion-parameter AI model on home grown infrastructure

    All you had to do was copy and paste the headline from TFA. [theregister.com]

    • Re:100 billion != 1 trillion (Score:5, Informative)

      by Westley ( 99238 ) on Sunday October 06, 2024 @03:14AM (#64843439) Homepage

      There are multiple articles linked in the post, and explicit mentions of multiple models. Yes, the Register one only refers to a 100 billion parameter model; the Tom's Hardware and South China Morning Post articles specifically talk about a 1 trillion parameter model. So does the post itself:

      > The South China Morning Post says the unnamed model has 1 trillion parameters, according to China Telecom, while the TeleChat2t-115B model has over 100 billion parameters.

      So, two models: one with 100 billion parameters, and one with 1 trillion parameters - at least allegedly. While we may or may not trust the source, there's no point in claiming that the trillion parameter model isn't mentioned.

    • All you had to do was copy and paste the headline from TFA. [theregister.com]

      Yeah but then you'd have to read the register why not paste one of the other headlines: "State-owned China Telecom has trained domestic AI LLMs using homegrown chips — one model reportedly uses 1 trillion parameters" there you go, copy and paste.

  • A LLM 'eats' 1 Trillion Parameters? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Sunday October 06, 2024 @03:39AM (#64843453)
    I bet it was hungry again in a hour /s

  • Surely they didn't think their sanctions would stop them? A delay is the best they could hope for...oh, and a big hit to US companies due to the loss of the Chinese market, and more competition around the world...not to mention an increase in the trade deficit...usa:"buy more stuff from us...no! Not that! Only things you don't want...buy more things you don't want!". So, they buy more of the things they can, but don't need, and stockpile them...and the US complains about that too. Sheesh.

  • It seems curious why a country of a billion people would be interested in developing AI capabilities that would potentially decimate middle-class jobs

    • Because if someone else has it and you don't, you're at an economic disadvantage. If you want the benefits of participation in the global economy, you have to deal with things like that. Both the good and the bad will equalize across borders, some things more rapidly than others.

      And then there's the military angle. And surveillance (both domestic and foreign).

      In areas where you can trust AI, it's faster and cheaper than humans.

    • The whole point of communism was that it was designed for when working became obsolete thanks to industrialization, which they thought was imminent. Turns out working wasn't obsolete yet, so the USSR collapsed and China went mostly capitalist. But obsoleting all those jobs is basically their dream -- not like in the US where it means you'll be homeless.

  • ... it is revealed that they mean they used NVIDIA chips which they claim is produced in China because Taiwan.

    (Thought the Chinese chip are actually not too bad)

  • "If the information is accurate" (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Sunday October 06, 2024 @09:33AM (#64843805)

    Wow, that sure is a big IF isn't it?

  • So what? (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Sunday October 06, 2024 @10:53AM (#64843905) Journal
    1. China lies about shit all the time
    2. Even it they're not, what a massive waste of hardware that could have been used for something actually useful instead of braindead excuse for AI

    • Maybe they should use that computing power to model more advanced weaponry?

      Eventually I hope all the ML systems are found to be not very useful. That will burn alot of companies and countries which rushed into a fad.

  • Without at least knowing token count of training set or whether it is a sparse or dense model one can't reason about the costs / system capabilities required for pre-training.

    Regardless wouldn't surprise me. China has always had some good models. One of my favorites is a 236B parameter deepseek.

  • Who needs a parametrized nonsense generator and custom fart sound effect generator?

  • I know China doesnt have any EUV lithography equipment, but if they can manufacture 5nm, which SMIC already produces domestically, at scale with good yields they can to a large degree overcome the sanctions in scale. They will just throw unbelievable amounts of money into it and boil oceans to generate the power to operate them. They also have complete control in where and how these chips will be consolidated and operated to extract the most value.

    I think the question is just long term. Unless they ca
  • Generally speaking, China doesn't care about any other nation's IP, except as something they want. My guess is that the domestically built chips they're talking about are either direct copies of or built from designs derived from an original design that some nation claims as IP.

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