China-listed artificial intelligence (AI) company iFLYTEK plans to HK$400 million ($51.23 million) in Hong Kong over the next five years.

The firm said in a statement on last Friday that it plans to establish international headquarters in Hong Kong, including an international business headquarters, an international research and development (R&D) center, an international trade and capital management platform, as well as a 150-member team to drive R&D and overseas market expansion, to establish an AI ecosystem with tens of thousands of developers.

The R&D projects include the in-depth development of intelligent speech and building large models, and AI infrastructure that covers intelligent education, intelligent speech technologies in Cantonese, data processing training, etc., thereby empowering Hong Kong’s AI industry ecosystem.

It is noted that IFLYTEK, along with its subsidiary Xunfei Healthcare Technology, are also establishing an international headquarters at Cyberport through the “Easy Landing Scheme”.

“Since its founding, iFLYTEK has consistently prioritized fundamental technological innovation, achieving international leadership in key areas such as multilingual intelligent speech technologies, automated speech transcription, and translation machine,

“For the first time in the industry, our machine speech synthesis could produce voice output with higher quality than ordinary human speakers, our automated speech transcription outperformed human stenographers, and our translation machine passed the China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters (CATTI) Level II for Chinese-English interpreting,” said Qingfeng Liu, Chairman of iFLYTEK.

Amid the current wave of general AI driven by advanced cognitive models, he noted that iFLYTEK released its SparkDesk Version 4.0 (iFLYTEK Spark 4.0), which, trained on Feixing-1, boasts comparable foundational capabilities with ChatGPT-4 Turbo (April 2024 version).

Additionally, he said the firm lead the industry in large speech models, image-text models, and specialized models for medical and educational applications.

“The strong support from the Hong Kong government for technological innovation and talent recruitment is a key reason we have chosen Hong Kong as the international hub for iFLYTEK,

“We look forward to deepening our cooperation with various sectors in Hong Kong to jointly advance the prosperity of the AI industry,” he added.

Simon Chan, Chairman of Cyberport, said the AI ecosystem that Cyberport is focusing on developing has become the engine for the development of the related industry.

According to him, the first phase of the AI supercomputing center facilities will be put into service within the year, enhancing Hong Kong’s fundamental R&D capabilities.

At the same time, he noted Cyberport has already housed 200 companies focusing on R&D, application, and infrastructure in AI and data science, linking up a vast partner network to drive AI innovation and industry development.

“With their established Xunfei Healthcare presence at Cyberport, iFLYTEK and Xunfei Healthcare can leverage their comprehensive advantages in AI to upgrade the structure of Cyberport’s AI ecosystem in all aspects, helping to drive innovative R&D, results transformation, and industrialization of AI in the city,

“This will not only ignite the potential of AI’s diverse applications to fuel the development of the digital economy and smart city but also set a benchmark to attract more leading AI companies from the Mainland and overseas to Hong Kong,” he said.

He noted that Cyberport will continue to work hard to introduce more flagship information and technology (I&T) companies through various programs, strengthening the city’s advantages in innovative R&D and internationalization, and helping Hong Kong move towards its vision of becoming an international I&T hub.

It is noted that after setting up operations at Cyberport, iFLYTEK will establish an international R&D center to advance the construction of core technologies such as intelligent speech, large cognitive model and arithmetic center, and to develop vertical application scenarios in the city.

At the same time, iFLYTEK will continue to strengthen its large model and computing power infrastructure, including building industry-specific large language models, customized enterprise large models, a unified large cognitive model foundation, high-performance heterogeneous computing power scheduling platforms, and heterogeneous computing power infrastructure.

This will empower strategic emerging industries such as the digital economy, intelligent manufacturing, new energy and new materials, delivering results in product upgrades, management efficiency improvements, and business value-add.

The firm will also form and strengthen cooperation with high-end AI institutions and universities in Hong Kong and overseas, cultivating a vibrant scientific research ecosystem.

It will actively expand its international business, entering the overseas market in education and consumer services and other domains, driving globalization of its core technologies.

The firm will also develop international funding and overseas trade platforms to attract capital from high-value-growth markets in Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond.

Xunfei Healthcare will also et up an international research institute at Cyberport, focusing on cutting-edge technology research that integrates medical health and AI.

This includes research on forward-looking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs in the medical field, medical LLM-assisted diagnosis and treatment recommendations, health management algorithms and applications, and medical and healthcare hardware systems that integrate medical LLMs.

Chinese AI firm iFLYTEK establishes regional HQ in Singapore to boost growth in Southeast Asia