Baidu, SenseTime lead China’s market for business-focused large language models, says IDC

The size of China’s LLM market was ‘not significant’ because company investments into AI models were still in the early stage, according to the report.

Reading Time:2 minutes

Private company investments into LLMs are still in the early stage, and many are adopting a wait-and-see approach. Photo: Shutterstock Images

Published: 7:00pm, 22 Aug 2024

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) giants Baidu and SenseTime, along with start-up Zhipu AI, are the country’s biggest providers of business-facing large language model (LLM) services, according to a new report, as tech firms continue to push for generative AI adoption.

Baidu AI Cloud leads China’s industry-facing LLM market with a 19.9 per cent market share and 350 million yuan (US$49 million) in revenue in 2023, according to a report released by market research firm IDC on Wednesday.

SenseTime was in second spot with 16 per cent of the market, followed by start-up Zhipu AI, IDC said, without revealing the latter’s market share.

Chinese start-up Baichuan and Hong Kong-listed 4Paradigm were the fourth and fifth largest players in the market, respectively, according to IDC. Baichuan and Zhipu AI are among the mainland’s four “AI tigers”.

The Baidu logo seen during the company’s Create conference in Shenzhen, China, April 16, 2024. Photo: Bloomberg

The size of China’s LLM market and related applications for business customers was 1.76 billion yuan last year, which the report described as “not significant” because company investments into AI models were still in the early stage, and many were still adopting a wait-and-see approach. LLMs are the technology underpinning GenAI services like ChatGPT.

But IDC noted that over the next two to three years, the market will undergo “multiple rounds of significant changes”.