Beijing non-profit academy offers open-source AI tools to fuel country’s adoption of the technology

A Beijing-based non-profit organisation on Friday launched a suite of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models and tools to help fuel the technology’s local development, in a fresh example of China’s efforts to make advances amid US attempts to curb its access to advanced technologies.

The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), which received a visit by Chinese Premier Li Qiang in March, unveiled a suite of large language models (LLMs), including its latest iteration of BAAI’s BGE model, Emu 3 multimodal, and a family of models that were used to develop the world’s first clinical robot for cardiac ultrasonic scanning, as well as other open source tools to make it easier for institutions and companies to conduct AI training.

“[BAAI is] committed to frontier, strategic, and original research and breakthroughs in the AI field,” Wang Zhongyuan, the organisation’s head, said in a keynote speech delivered at an industry conference. “In the past few years, BAAI has made extraordinary contributions to technologies that propelled the whole industry’s development.”

More than 47 million copies of BAAI’s open source LLMs have been downloaded globally. By comparison, Facebook parent Meta Platforms’ Llama 3 series, the US tech giant’s most advanced open source counterpart, has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times on developer platform Hugging Face.

Founded in November 2018 with the backing of the Beijing municipality and the Chinese science and technology ministry, BAAI has long been hailed as the cradle of China’s LLM research. It was established several years before Microsoft-backed OpenAI shook the global technology world with its groundbreaking ChatGPT debut in November 2022.

In 2021, BAAI launched Wudao 1, the country’s first LLM. A number of researchers who worked on the Wudao project are now spearheading some of China’s high-flying AI start-ups.

Yang Zhiling and Zhang Peng, who head Moonshot AI and Zhipu AI, respectively, both trace their roots back to BAAI and the Wudao project. The two start-ups are both valued at more than US$3 billion in recent funding talks, making them the most valuable Chinese AI firms.

As Washington considers additional measures to contain China’s AI rise over national security concerns, from further export curbs on AI chips to limits on Chinese access to US-made AI models, BAAI remains hopeful of more global collaboration and dismissed the idea that the US could deter China’s AI development.

In a recent interview with local media, Wang said that the US eventually will choose to work together with China, especially when the era of artificial general intelligence arrives, and the world needs to cooperate to contain AI-induced risks. Wang said the restrictions the US has placed on China’s access to AI computing power, talent, and the technology exchanges between the two countries will “certainly have an impact on China”, but it can only delay, not stop, China’s AI progress.