BEIJING/SHANGHAI, July 7 (Reuters) - Huawei's artificial

intelligence research division has rejected claims that a

version of its Pangu Pro large language model has copied

elements from an Alibaba ( BABA ) model, saying that it was

independently developed and trained.

The division, called Noah Ark Lab, issued the statement on

Saturday, a day after an entity called HonestAGI posted an

English-language paper on code-sharing platform Github, saying

Huawei's Pangu Pro Moe (Mixture of Experts) model showed

"extraordinary correlation" with Alibaba's ( BABA ) Qwen 2.5 14B.

This suggests that Huawei's model was derived through

"upcycling" and was not trained from scratch, the paper said,

prompting widespread discussion in AI circles online and in

Chinese tech-focused media.

The paper added that its findings indicated potential

copyright violation, the fabrication of information in technical

reports and false claims about Huawei's investment in training

the model.

Noah Ark Lab said in its statement that the model was "not

based on incremental training of other manufacturers' models"

and that it had "made key innovations in architecture design and

technical features." It is the first large-scale model built

entirely on Huawei's Ascend chips, it added.

It also said that its development team had strictly adhered

to open-source license requirements for any third-party code

used, without elaborating which open-source models it took

reference from.

Alibaba ( BABA ) did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for

comment. Reuters was unable to contact HonestAGI or learn who is

behind the entity.

The release of Chinese startup DeepSeek's open-source model

R1 in January this year shocked Silicon Valley with its low cost

and sparked intense competition between China's tech giants to

offer competitive products.

Qwen 2.5-14B was released in May 2024 and is one of

Alibaba's ( BABA ) small-sized Qwen 2.5 model family which can be

deployed on PC and smartphones.

While Huawei entered the large language model arena early

with its original Pangu release in 2021, it has since been

perceived as lagging behind rivals. It open-sourced its Pangu

Pro Moe models on Chinese developer platform GitCode in late

June, seeking to boost the adoption of its AI tech by providing

free access to developers.

While Qwen is more consumer-facing and has chatbot services

like ChatGPT, Huawei's Pangu models tend to be more used in

government as well as the finance and manufacturing sectors.