TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is reportedly planning to develop a new AI model that will be trained on Huawei's Ascend 910B chips. The move comes after the U.S.' export restrictions on advanced AI chips made by American companies to China.
Since 2022, the United States has put heavy regulations on the export of advanced AI chips, forcing ByteDance to look for other alternatives. The TikTok parent has tried to diversify its supply chain to mitigate export restrictions and has turned toward local suppliers for its AI chip requirements so that it can develop its own technologies.
According to a report by Reuters, ByteDance's upcoming project involves training a large language model (LLM) primarily with Huawei's Ascend 910B chips. Currently, these chips are being used by ByteDance for less computationally intensive tasks such as inference (where models that are already trained make predictions). However, training an entirely new model on these chips could be challenging since that requires even more advanced chips capable of processing a lot of data, which is something that the Ascend 910B chips cannot do easily.
Despite that, ByteDance had ordered over 100,000 of these chips from Huawei, although they received less than 30,000 as of July 2024. This further slowed down ByteDance's ambitions of creating a new model.
ByteDance's best LLM is its Doubao chatbot, which was launched in August 2023. The chatbot is quite popular in China and has more than 10 million monthly active users. The company also recently introduced two new models capable of creating videos, similar to OpenAI's Sora (which has still not been launched for the public).
Nevertheless, ByteDance has publicly denied all claims of planning a new AI model. Michael Hughes, a TikTok spokesperson in Washington, D.C., told Reuters that "the entire premise here is wrong," asserting that no new model is currently under development.
It's worth noting that ByteDance remains Microsoft's largest client in Asia for Nvidia chips accessible via Azure, as trade restrictions continue to hinder its AI ambitions.
Source: Reuters
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