By Gabby Chen

(JW Insights) Mar 2 -- MOSS, the first large-scale conversational language model in China, will be made an open-source software by the end of March. Its parameter scale is about 1/10 of OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to reports by China Daily and JW Insights. It was developed by a team in Shanghai's Fudan University.

MOSS is named after the AI-based computer that controls the space station in the popular Chinese sci-fi film The Wandering Earth II. It was made available for public testing on February 20, according to a China Daily report on February 28.

The developing team at Fudan University's School of Computer Science and Technology revealed on March 2 that the biggest difference between MOSS and ChatGPT is parameter scale. ChatGPT has 175 billion parameters, which is nearly ten times that of MOSS.

The R&D team chose this parameter scale because they aim to develop exploratory technologies under the budget. The team believes MOSS can realize intellectual and dialogue capabilities at this parameter level, said the JW Insights report.

Qiu Xipeng, professor at Fudan University's School of Computer Science and Technology, set a short-term goal of making MOSS a domestically advanced conversational language model. He hopes to open up the research results freely to the industry, promoting the generation of customization and special applications.

"Large-scale language models are almost monopolized by foreign countries. They only develop APIs (application programming interfaces) or do not open them to us," Qiu said.

Making MOSS an open-source software can effectively reduce the threshold for the development and application of pre-trained language models, thus allowing small and medium-sized enterprises to develop various vertical products, such as smart customer service, smart home and AI lawyers on the basis of it, according to China Daily.