Chinese Researchers Develop AI Model for Military Use Based on Meta's Llama Model

According to academic papers and analysts, high-level Chinese research institutions connected to the People's Liberation Army have utilized Meta's public Llama model to develop an artificial intelligence tool for potential military applications. A paper reviewed in June detailed how six Chinese researchers from three institutions, two of which are under the leading research body of the PLA, the Academy of Military Sciences, used an early version of Meta's Llama as a foundation for what they termed "ChatBIT."

The researchers incorporated their own parameters to create a military-focused AI tool, leveraging Meta's Llama 2 13B large language model (LLM), which was released in February 2023, to provide accurate and reliable information for intelligence gathering, processing, and operational decision-making. The paper stated that ChatBIT was fine-tuned and optimized for dialogue and question-answering tasks within the military domain, and it was found to outperform some other AI models that are roughly 90% as capable as OpenAI's powerful ChatGPT-4.

However, the researchers did not provide detailed information on how they defined performance or whether the AI model has been deployed.