iFlytek Spark V2.0

What it is

SparkDesk V2.0 is the second version of the large language model built by iFlytek. The company presented it at a launch event in Hefei, Anhui province, on 15 August 2023, with chairman Liu Qingfeng speaking on stage^[1][2]. The presentation centred on two areas of improvement: programming work and the handling of images, pictures and video^[1].

The coding upgrade

iFlytek described the coding side of V2.0 as covering five kinds of work: generating code, completing code, correcting errors, explaining code, and writing unit tests^[2]. Alongside the model, the company launched iFlyCode 1.0, a programming assistant aimed at developers^[1]. iFlyCode 1.0 gives step-by-step suggestions for a task, offers a ready-to-use code snippet for each step, and can explain and revise code that already exists^[1].

A demonstration at the event showed how far the spoken-instruction route had come: vice president Liu Cong used spoken instructions to build an aerial-handwriting function in Python in about 10 minutes^[1].

iFlytek also reported numbers from early alpha testing, saying that up to 30% of the code the assistant generated could be used directly, and claiming that this would raise coding efficiency by 30%^[3]. Those figures came from the company itself rather than from independent evaluation.

Multimodal demonstrations

The multimodal part of the launch was shown through demos in which the model described images, generated pictures, and produced short videos from classical poems^[2]. iFlytek highlighted improvement in image description and analysis, and in generating text from images^[3]. At the event, V2.0 generated an image inspired by a celebrated poem, and the company said it had built applications on these features for its AI learning pad^[3].

Hardware and deployment

iFlytek also announced a collaboration with Huawei Ascend on an all-in-one product for training and running large models^[1]. The company said the platform built on Huawei hardware would offer several models of different parameter sizes, so that customers could pick the one that suited their needs^[3].

Reception and what came next

The launch did not lift the company's share price. Jiemian reported that iFlytek shares fell 8.63% after the V2.0 launch^[3]. The version was short-lived as the company's flagship: it was succeeded by Spark V3.0 in October 2023^[4].

The release is best read as a step in a fast sequence of versions, in which a Chinese model maker paired a general language model with a dedicated coding product and with hardware partnerships intended to make large-model training and inference easier to buy.