(JW Insights) May 29 -- China’s largest Q&A platform Zhihu(知乎) has launched a large language model named Luca in collaboration with Model Best, a Beijing-based startup engaged in artificial intelligence models, joining the chatbot race to offer a potential rival to ChatGPT, reported China Daily on May 28.

Li Dahai, partner and chief technology officer of Zhihu, said its intelligent search application based on AI started internal testing on May 27. He made the remarks at a launch event during the 2023 China International Big Data Industry Expo, which ended on May 28 in Guiyang, southwestern China’s Guizhou Province.

As an open-source large language model and generative AI product, Luca showcased its versatile capabilities in writing essays and programming code, making business plans, mathematical reasoning and understanding the Chinese language and culture. Li said the company will continue to improve its functions.

Zhihu is the latest Chinese tech company after Baidu, Alibaba Group, iFlytek and other domestic counterparts to bet big on generative AI technology.

Large language models are AI models fed huge amounts of text data for use in a variety of tasks, ranging from natural language processing to machine translation, according to the report from China Daily.

(GaoJ/Yuan XY)