Investing HK$400 million to Build a 150-member Team and Leading AI and Medical AI Development in Hong Kong

HONG KONG SAR - Media OutReach Newswire - 19 July 2024 - iFLYTEK Co., Ltd., renowned in the Asia-Pacific region and a leading listed company specialising in intelligent speech and Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with its subsidiary Xunfei Healthcare Technology Co., Ltd., is establishing an international headquarters at Cyberport through the "Easy Landing Scheme". The signing ceremony for the landing was held today (July 19) at Cyberport. Witnessed by Prof. Sun Dong, Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry; Lillian Cheong, Under Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry; Simon Chan, Chairman of Cyberport; Dawei Duan, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK; and Dr Tao Xiaodong, CEO of Xunfei Healthcare, the agreement was signed by Dr Rocky Cheng, CEO of Cyberport and Chen Cheng, Strategic Development Department General Manager of iFLYTEK.

iFLYTEK and Xunfei Healthcare plan to invest HK$400 million in Hong Kong over the next five years to establish international headquarters, including an international business headquarters, an international Research and Development (R&D) centre, 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. Meanwhile, Xunfei Healthcare will set up an international research institute at Cyberport focusing on cutting-edge technology research that integrates medical health and AI.

Prof. Sun Dong, Secretary for Innovation,Technology, and Industry stated: "The HKSAR Government has been actively supporting the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong, focusing on AI and life and health technologies as technology industries with an edge to develop. iFLYTEK and Xunfei Healthcare are exemplary leaders in these two important fields. iFLYTEK is establishing its presence in Hong Kong by setting up its international headquarters, which includes an international R&D centre, an international business headquarters, and an international trade and capital management platform. Additionally, Xunfei Healthcare will establish an international research institute at Cyberport. Their presence will contribute to the development of Hong Kong's AI industry ecosystem. AI is a very important industry development direction for Hong Kong. Currently, Hong Kong has gathered a large number of leading enterprises locally and from overseas, as well as hundreds of outstanding AI companies, forming an AI ecosystem in Hong Kong."

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. The first phase of the AI Supercomputing Centre facilities will be put into service within the year, enhancing Hong Kong's fundamental R&D capabilities. At the same time, 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 industrialisation 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. Cyberport will continue to work hard to introduce more flagship I&T companies through various programmes, strengthening the city's advantages in innovative R&D and internationalisation, and helping Hong Kong move towards its vision of becoming an international I&T hub."

Qingfeng Liu, Chairman of iFLYTEK delivered a speech via video, "Since its founding, iFLYTEK has consistently prioritised 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. Amid the current wave of general AI driven by advanced cognitive models, 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, we lead the industry in large speech models, image-text models, and specialised 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."

Dawei Duan, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK, said, "We are grateful to the HKSAR government's comprehensive support, especially to the Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau in facilitating the landing of iFLYTEK and Xunfei Healthcare, bolstering our confidence in developing our presence in Hong Kong and utilizing it as a strategic base for our international expansion. The timing of our establishment in Hong Kong's Cyberport aligns fortuitously with the successful conclusion of the Third Plenary Session of the 20^th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. This pivotal meeting has outlined a clear direction and provided significant policy momentum for further reform and modernization in China. We maintain strong confidence in China's economic and social development trajectory and hold high expectations for Hong Kong's distinctive role in advancing the grand endeavour of Chinese-style modernisation. At iFLYTEK, our unwavering mission is to 'shape a brighter future with AI.' We are committed to accelerating our research and development initiatives, fostering both international and domestic collaborations, and leveraging AI best practices to address pressing societal needs. Our goal is to realize the principle of 'Tech for Social Good' by applying innovative solutions to real-world challenges."

iFLYTEK AI Ranks Among National Frontrunners
Comprehensive Capability Benchmark of Large Models Against ChatGPT-4 Turbo

As a cutting-edge AI company, iFLYTEK has established China's only National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence and the National Engineering Research Center for Speech and Language Information Processing (NERC-SLIP). Additionally, iFLYTEK co-chairs the Speech Industry Alliance of China Innovation Alliance, the Artificial Intelligence Industry-University-Research Innovation Alliance of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Yangtze River Delta Artificial Intelligence Industry Chain Alliance. Listed in Shenzhen, with over 15,000 employees, iFLYTEK focuses on core technology research areas of intelligent speech, computer vision, natural language processing, and cognitive intelligence. It actively promotes the R&D of AI products and their application in different industries, covering application scenarios and industrial chains such as intelligent education, open platforms and consumer business, smart city, telecom operators, intelligent vehicles, smart finance, smart offices, and intelligent hardware, etc.

iFLYTEK "SparkDesk" possesses seven core capabilities including text generation, language understanding, knowledge question answering, logical reasoning, mathematics, coding, and multimodal abilities. Unveiled this June, 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). It excels in 8 out of the 12 mainstream test sets in Chinese and English, both domestic and international. As of June 30, 2024, iFLYTEK's open platform shares 708 advanced AI capabilities and solutions with over 7.06 million certified developers. The platform supports more than 2.48 million applications and connects with over 4.06 billion terminal devices, partnering with more than 5 million affiliates, in addition to 782,000 registered members of its AI Academy, forming a thriving AI community centering around iFLYTEK. Currently, iFLYTEK intelligent language technology has been adopted by the Hong Kong Legislative Council. Pilot programmes have also been launched in many secondary and primary schools with its intelligent education system.

Promoting Core Technology R&D in Hong Kong
Enhancing Computing Power & Large Models
Empowering Strategic Emerging Industries
Expanding Overseas Markets and Attracting Investment

After setting up operations at Cyberport, iFLYTEK will establish an international R&D centre to advance the construction of core technologies such as intelligent speech, large cognitive model and arithmetic centre, 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, customised 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.

iFLYTEK 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 globalisation of its core technologies. iFLYTEK will also develop international funding and overseas trade platforms to attract capital from high-value-growth markets in Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond.

Subsidiary Xunfei Healthcare's General Practice Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) World's First and Only Intelligent Solution to Pass the National Medical Licensing Examination[1]

As a leading medical AI company in Mainland China, Xunfei Healthcare was the sole corporate participant in drafting the "Technical Evaluation System and Standard Specifications of LLMs for Use in Healthcare". Xunfei Healthcare specialises in primary care, smart hospitals, regional management platforms, patient services, and other application areas, providing services and products such as General practice CDSS, Chronic Disease Management tools, diagnosis and treatment assistants, patient services and post-discharge management platforms, cloud medical imaging platform, AI hardware, regional healthcare administrator services, and medical insurance administrative services. Its eight subsidiaries cover areas such as medical technology services, Internet hospitals, software development and technical services, and medical services, and have achieved good results in improving the level of hospital informatisation and intelligence, as well as in enhancing primary care physicians' diagnostic and treatment capabilities. In the field of smart hospitals, Xunfei Healthcare provides comprehensive solutions connecting hospitals, doctors, and patients across the pre-diagnosis, during, and post-diagnosis stages. It has already served over 400 hospitals (including more than 40 of China's top 100 hospitals and seven of China's top 10 hospitals). Currently, Xunfei Healthcare has provided services to 228 tertiary hospitals and 42 secondary hospitals[2] Xunfei Healthcare, ranking among the top AI solution providers for medical institutions on the Mainland.

Xunfei Healthcare's General Practice CDSS is the world's first and only intelligent solution to pass the National Medical Licensing Examination (General Written test), with a pass rate exceeding 96.3% of human examinees. CDSS has covered over 400 districts and counties across more than 30 provinces in China, providing over 700 million Al-assisted diagnosis suggestions and treatment recommendations, and correcting over 1.3 million diagnoses cases. Xunfei Healthcare's proprietary "Xunfei Spark Medical Model"[3] has a billion-level high-quality medical data repository, covering over 300 medical scenarios, with core capabilities in expert-level MKGQA. The Xunfei Spark Medical Model has capabilities of expert-level medical knowledge graph question answering ("MKGQA"), clinical language understanding ("CLU"), medical document generation, disease diagnostic and treatment recommendations, multi-round medical dialogue, and multi-modal interactions.

Xunfei Healthcare will set 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.


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About Cyberport

Cyberport is Hong Kong's digital technology flagship and incubator for entrepreneurship with over 2,000 members including over 900 onsite and over 1,100 offsite start-ups and technology companies. It is managed by Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited, wholly owned by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, and committed to the vision to inject new impetus into digital economy and smart city development through innovation and technology, and to connect enterprises to Mainland China and overseas markets. Cyberport strives to nurture a vibrant tech ecosystem by cultivating talents, promoting entrepreneurship among the youth, supporting start-ups, fostering technology industry development by promoting strategic collaboration with local, Mainland Chinese and international partners, and integrating new and traditional economies by accelerating digital transformation in public and private sectors.

For more information, please visit http://www.cyberport.hk.