iFlytek Spark V3.5

What it is Spark V3.5 (讯飞星火 V3.5) is a large language model developed by iFlytek and released on 30 January 2024. In the API, the model name generalv3.5 points to Spark Max. ^[5] The top-tier version was offered as the Spark3.5 Max API. ^[4]

A large language model is a general-purpose text model: it can answer questions, write, summarise and translate, depending on what it is asked to do. Spark V3.5 belongs to this category. Its distinguishing feature, in iFlytek's own account, was the platform it was trained on, which is described below.

Origins Spark V3.5 was the first Spark model trained on the fully domestic FlyingStar One (飞星一号, Feixing No.1) computing platform. FlyingStar One is a 10,000-card computing platform built with Huawei. It went into service on 24 October 2023 and was said to support the training of models with trillion parameters. ^[1]

The model was launched on the afternoon of 30 January 2024. Its release also included a Spark speech model, which iFlytek said beat OpenAI Whisper V3 on recognition across a first batch of 37 major languages. An open-source model, Spark-13B, was released on the MindSpore community of Huawei at the same event. ^[1]

Main features iFlytek compared Spark V3.5 with GPT-4 Turbo on several measures. It said the model surpassed GPT-4 Turbo in language understanding and math. Its coding ability was put at 96% of GPT-4 Turbo, and its multimodal understanding at 91% of GPT-4V. Multimodal means the model can handle more than one kind of input, such as images together with text. ^[1]

TechNode, which reported the claims, noted that iFlytek did not specify the criteria used for these comparisons. ^[2] Readers should therefore take the percentages as the company's own figures.

At launch, the iFlytek open platform had more than 350,000 developers building on large models, and more than 220,000 of them were enterprise developers. ^[1]

Place in development Liu Qingfeng (刘庆峰) said that Spark aimed to catch up with the best level of GPT-4 in the first half of 2024. ^[1] By June 2024 a total of 7.02 million developers had used V3.5, including more than 400,000 overseas developers. ^[3]

On 22 May 2024 iFlytek made the Spark Lite API free permanently and priced the top Spark3.5 Max API at RMB 0.21 per 10,000 tokens. A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes, so a price per 10,000 tokens is a way of pricing usage by the amount of text. ^[4] The naming in the API is also a point to note: generalv3.5 points to Spark Max, so developers calling the model by that name should expect Spark Max to answer. ^[5]

Spark V3.5 was succeeded by Spark V4.0 in June 2024. ^[3]