Shares of iFlytek rose Monday after the Chinese artificial-intelligence company unveiled a generative language model that it said rivals the technology of ChatGPT.
Shares of the speech-recognition specialist increased by the 10% daily limit in Shenzhen, bringing year-to-date gains to 95% amid a buying frenzy of Chinese AI-related shares, fueled in part by buzz over OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot technology.
IFlytek Chairman Liu Qingfeng said at a demonstration event Saturday that its large language model, SparkDesk, has surpassed ChatGPT in Chinese “and will be comparable in English” by late October.
The company is “far ahead of the existing testable systems in China” in terms of language understanding, a core ability to recognize large language models with a variety of plug-ins and tools, Mr. Liu said. “There are slight differences compared with ChatGPT, and we are still in the process of continuous improvement.”
Analysts from Huatai Securities said in a research note that SparkDesk “performs well” in artificial general intelligence core competencies such as long text generation and language understanding, adding that the company provided a clear timeline for upgrading capabilities.
Huatai raised its target price on iFlytek to 83.93 yuan ($12.15) from CNY77.00 while maintaining a buy rating. The stock was recently 10% higher at CNY63.86.
IFlytek is among the first batch of companies to create Chinese-language versions of the large language model technology that underpins ChatGPT. Search engine Baidu launched its Ernie Bot in March and Alibaba in April announced plans to roll out generative AI across its apps.