iFlytek Unveils Large Model “Spark 3.0” Amidst Stock Price Hitting Daily Limit Down

On October 24, the 2023 iFlytek Global Developer Festival was launched in Hefei, Anhui Province. Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFlytek, announced the official release of iFlytek’s large language model Spark 3.0 on the festival, claiming that its comprehensive capabilities have surpassed ChatGPT 3.5.

According to iFlytek, Spark 3.0 will fully benchmark ChatGPT, surpassing it in Chinese language capability and being on par with it in terms of English language capability. Liu Qingfeng also revealed that Spark 3.0 is far ahead of ChatGPT 3.5 in mathematical ability. In areas such as design scheme generation, code completion, testing and error checking, Spark 3.0’s capabilities have already surpassed ChatGPT.

A horizontal evaluation report by the the Chinese State Council’s Institute of Economic Research shows that iFlytek’s Spark 3.0 has surpassed ChatGPT in comprehensive capabilities, showing outstanding performance especially in education, healthcare, and law.

iFlytek acknowledges that there is still a gap between Spark 3.0 and OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. The company plans to release a model benchmarked against GPT-4 in the first half of 2024.

However, as Spark 3.0 made its debut, iFlytek’s stock fell to its daily limit during the afternoon trading session. By closing bell on October 24, the stock price had declined by 9.97% to 46.7 yuan per share. The trading volume reached 5.852 billion yuan, resulting in a market value loss of over 10 billion yuan in just one day.

The most probable reason behind the dramatic fall is, during the weekend, iFlytek’s tutoring device was accused by some Chinese parents of containing content that “go against mainstream values”. In response, iFlytek permanently removed the related content and conducted a systematic investigation.

In addition, in the past year, iFlytek’s financial performance has been dismal. According to the company’s financial report, in the third quarter of 2023, iFlytek’s revenue increased by 2.89% compared to the same period last year; the net profit attributable to shareholders decreased by 81.86% and 76.36% respectively for the third quarter and first three quarters; the company incurred a loss of 324 million Chinese yuan after deducting non-recurring gains or losses for the first three quarters.

Regarding this, iFlytek has defended itself by stressing on the company’s “firm commitment to investment in general artificial intelligence cognitive models”.