iFlytek releases Spark V3.0
iFlytek said the update matched ChatGPT 3.5 in English and surpassed it in Chinese, while promising a GPT-4-competitive model in the first half of 2024.
- Models & capabilities
- Benchmarks & progress
- Minor
iFlytek’s chairman Liu Qingfeng unveiled Spark V3.0, the third major update to the company’s Chinese-language model, at the opening of the 2023 Global 1024 Developers Festival in Hefei. iFlytek said the update improved seven core capabilities, including text generation, language understanding, reasoning and coding, and claimed the model now matched OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in English while surpassing it in Chinese-language tasks.
The claim was deliberately narrower than rivals such as Baidu were making about their own models around the same time: iFlytek positioned Spark V3.0 against ChatGPT rather than GPT-4, and said explicitly that a model intended to compete with GPT-4 would not follow until the first half of 2024. Alongside the core model, iFlytek released twelve industry-specific variants covering sectors including finance, law, healthcare, education and smart vehicles, reflecting a strategy of embedding the model into vertical products rather than competing purely as a general-purpose chatbot.
The announcement coincided with a sharp fall in iFlytek’s share price, which dropped by its daily trading limit on the day of the launch — a reaction reported at the time without a clearly agreed explanation, though it came against a broader slide in Chinese tech stocks and scepticism about how quickly the company’s AI investments would become profitable.
Spark V3.0 was one of a wave of Chinese large-language-model updates in September and October 2023 — alongside releases from Baidu, Alibaba and others — that positioned domestic models as closing the gap with, though still trailing, GPT-4 on general capability while claiming parity or superiority on Chinese-language tasks specifically.