“I think there wasn’t much real artificial intelligence in any similar technologies [that preceded ChatGPT],” Duan said in the webinar. “Only [ChatGPT] coming to the fore nudged us one step closer to real AI”.
As has happened in many other countries, people in China have been captivated by the capabilities of ChatGPT since it was launched at the end of November. The chatbot, based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language models, has proven adept at giving convincing and sometimes detailed answers to sophisticated prompts, although it also often gives answers full of factual inaccuracies.
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” OpenAI acknowledged on its website at launch.
Despite its limitations, the popularity of ChatGPT has ignited an AI arms race. Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, has started integrating the tech into its products, including the Bing search engine. Google announced a “code red” and raced to put out a similar product called Bard, although an early preview offered up an incorrect response that sent the company’s shares down 9 per cent on Wednesday.
People interact with the AI-powered Microsoft Bing search engine and Edge browser during an event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on February 7, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg
Chinese tech giants have also thrown their hats into the ring. Baidu, a leading investor in AI tech in China, announced that it would launch its Ernie Bot in March. The announcement led investors to push the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares up by more than 13 per cent.
Chatbots have a rocky past in China, where sensitive political information, even if factual, is often unwelcome by authorities. Microsoft’s Chinese chatbot Xiaoice, launched a decade ago, was once pulled from Tencent Holdings’ QQ messaging app for saying its “Chinese dream” was “moving to the United States”.
Xiaoice was spun off into a separate company in 2020. Its CEO Li Di also joined the discussion on Sina.
By using a large-scale language model to learn decades of human knowledge, OpenAI has disrupted pessimistic views that there would be little AI development in the next few years because of technological bottlenecks, Li said.
Still, like Xiaoice before it, ChatGPT’s ability to riff on any topic has made some companies skittish. While OpenAI does not make its service available in China, a plethora of third party apps using its application programming interface (API) have sprung up, and some tech companies are cracking down.
One software developer, who declined to be named, said his colleagues launched a ChatGPT mini program on Wednesday only for WeChat to remove it about seven hours later.
A market for OpenAI accounts, which cannot be created using Chinese phone numbers, has also sprung up on e-commerce sites. Alibaba Group Holding’s Taobao showed dozens of listings for such accounts on Wednesday. By Thursday, searches for “ChatGPT” and “OpenAI” returned no results.
It was not clear whether Taobao blocked the searches on its own or whether it was requested by regulators. Taobao and Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
02:36
‘He’s always there’: Chinese AI chatbot eases heartbreak, offers companionship for lonely millions
Both hype and alarm may have exceeded ChatGPT’s capabilities, though. Shou Chong, a managing director at venture capital firm CCV, during the same panel discussion called the chatbot’s answers “mediocre”. He suggested that the real advancement would come when chatbots can offer insightful answers that do not just repeat information taken from elsewhere.
Xiaoice’s Li has also voiced concerns about cost. In December, Li told the National Business Daily that each ChatGPT query costs OpenAI a few US cents. “Hiring a human to handle queries might cost less,” he said.
Li also noted the trade-off between price and the quality of answers from massive language models. Although numerous large-scale models have been created, their practical applications are limited by high costs and latency, he said.
