Chinese artificial intelligence startup ModelBest Inc launched on Thursday its latest light-weighted large model, an emerging less expensive AI technology that aims for more targeted commercialized scenarios.

Dubbed as MiniCPM-2B, the newly-launched large model is embedded with a parameter of 2 billion, which is much smaller than 1.7 trillion parameters of OpenAI's massive GPT-4.

Li Dahai, CEO of ModelBest, said that the new model has very close performance when compared with Mistral-7B on open-sourced general benchmarks with better ability on Chinese, mathematics and coding.

The overall performance exceeds MPT-30B and Falcon-40B, which are large models with some 10-billion-level parameters.

Industry experts explained that smaller models require fewer calculations to operate, so they require less powerful processors and less time to complete responses.

"If the model is compressed, the inference cost of running such a model can be reduced greatly," Li said.

"With the popularity of such end-side models, the inference cost of mobile phones will further decrease in the future," he added.

chengyu@chinadaily.com.cn