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The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, will build its latest artificial intelligence model with Huawei Technologies chips.
According to Reuters, this is due to the US restrictions on advanced AI chip exports that have made ByteDance choose domestic suppliers.
Sources close to ByteDance confirmed that the company is going to use Huawei's Ascend 910B chip to train its next large-language AI model. ByteDance is changing its strategy due to the supply chain challenges faced by it and the evolving market demands.
The company has already been using the Ascend 910B for less computationally intensive workloads. However, now it is looking to boost its AI model training capabilities with the chip.
Technological advancements in AI have made the tech industry a playground of firms competing against each other to integrate custom models. The latest announcement from ByteDance would, therefore, reflect the company's interest in not losing ground in such a scenario.
However, it does face some challenges. ByteDance despite having seen over 100,000 orders for the Ascend chip this year, reportedly received less than 30,000 as of July. This is making it hard to provide a timeline for the development of the new AI model.
ByteDance's future AI model will be less potent in terms of computation power. However, the tech giant is leaning on Huawei's technology to have better AI offerings.
Recently, ByteDance has witnessed a huge surge in people using its current AI applications, including the Doubao chatbot. Doubao chatbot attained more than 10 million monthly active users since its launch.
TikTok’s spokesperson declared claims of a new AI model as baseless. However, he further noted that the company is exploring innovative ways of applying AI technology.
ByteDance remains one of Huawei's biggest customers for AI chips. The company is also one of the major buyers of Nvidia's H20 AI chip tailored for the Chinese market.
