China’s efforts to match US computing power in artificial intelligence are being hampered by bug-ridden software, with customers of leading AI chipmaker Huawei complaining about performance issues and the difficulty of switching from Nvidia products. The Chinese technology giant has emerged as the frontrunner in the race to develop a domestic alternative to industry leader Nvidia, after Washington further tightened export controls on high-performance silicon last October. Its Ascend series has become an increasingly popular option for Chinese AI groups to run inference, a process that applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT use to generate responses to queries. But multiple industry insiders, including an AI engineer at a partner company, said the chips still lagged far behind Nvidia’s for the initial training of models. They blamed stability issues, slower inter-chip connectivity and inferior software developed by Huawei called Cann. Nvidia’s software platform Cuda is renowned as the company’s “secret sauce” for being easy for developers to use and capable of vastly accelerating data processing. Huawei is one of many companies trying to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI chips by creating alternative software. Huawei’s own employees are among those complaining about Cann. One researcher, who declined to be named, said it made the Ascend product “difficult and unstable to use” and work on testing it was being hampered. “When random errors occur, it is very difficult to find out where it comes from due to poor documentation. You need talented developers to read the source code to see what the issue is, which slows everything down. The coding is imperfect,” they said. Another Chinese engineer briefed on Baidu’s use of the Huawei processors said the chips crashed frequently, complicating AI development work.
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