AI’s new frontier: affordable, domain-specific models are coming, says PolyU scientist

Former Alibaba scientist Yang Hongxia is at the forefront of an effort to evolve AI beyond DeepSeek’s breakthroughs

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Specialised AI models that excel in fields such as biomedicine could be the next big thing in the industry. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00am, 26 Feb 2025Updated: 10:32am, 26 Feb 2025

A renowned professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), and a former artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding, is trying to work with experts across different fields to develop “affordable” domain-specific models.

Yang Hongxia, who joined PolyU’s Department of Computing last year after decades in the technology industry, is at the forefront of an effort to use the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in specialised applications. Her efforts come as Chinese companies, spurred by the success of start-up DeepSeek, move to open-source their AI models, giving greater access to the tech.

“While current LLMs have made impressive strides in general intelligence, they still fall short in specific domains in fields such as manufacturing and biochemistry,” Yang said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. Alibaba owns the Post.

“This gap exists because much of the relevant data for these fields hasn’t been incorporated into AI model development, because they cannot be crawled from the general web” she said. Yang added that general-purpose models require adjustments to fit specialised domains.

Yang Hongxia is at the forefront of developing affordable specialised AI models. Photo: Sina

Yang is leading the establishment of an AI academy, which aims to drive fundamental scientific breakthroughs. The team, primarily composed of students from domestic universities including PolyU, Zhejiang University and Harbin Institute of Technology, is working on “democratising AI development”.