Wu_Dao
Wu Dao
Chinese multimodal artificial intelligence program
Wu Dao (Chinese: 悟道; pinyin: wùdào; lit. 'road to awareness')[1] is a multimodal artificial intelligence developed by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI).[2][3][4] Wu Dao 1.0 was first announced on January 11, 2021;[1][5] an improved version, Wu Dao 2.0, was announced on May 31.[6][5] It has been compared to GPT-3,[7] and is built on a similar architecture; in comparison, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters[8][9] — variables and inputs within the machine learning model — while Wu Dao has 1.75 trillion parameters.[6][10] Wu Dao was trained on 4.9 terabytes of images and texts (which included 1.2 terabytes of Chinese text and 1.2 terabytes of English text),[6][11] while GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of text data.[12] Yet, a growing body of work highlights the importance of increasing both data and parameters.[13] The chairman of BAAI said that Wu Dao was an attempt to "create the biggest, most powerful AI model possible";[8] although direct comparisons between models based on parameter count (i.e. between Wu Dao and GPT-3) do not directly correlate to quality.[9] Wu Dao 2.0, was called "the biggest language A.I. system yet".[4] It was interpreted by commenters as an attempt to "compete with the United States".[14][15]. Notably, the type of architecture used for Wu Dao 2.0 is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model,[5] unlike GPT-3, which is a "dense" model:[16] while MoE models require much less computational power to train than dense models with the same numbers of parameters,[16] trillion-parameter MoE models have shown comparable performance to models that are hundreds of times smaller.[16]
Wu Dao's creators demonstrated its ability to perform natural language processing and image recognition, in addition to generation of text and images.[5] The model can not only write essays, poems and couplets in traditional Chinese, it can both generate alt text based on a static image and generate nearly photorealistic images based on natural language descriptions. Wu Dao also showed off its ability to power virtual idols (with a little help from Microsoft-spinoff Xiaoice) and predict the 3D structures of proteins like AlphaFold.[5]