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MicrosoftSupported OpenAI has kept their hit ChatGPT app out of the way in China, but it’s garnering huge interest in the country, with companies rushing to integrate the technology. into their products and launch competitive solutions.
While domestic residents cannot create an OpenAI account to access artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbots, virtual private networks and foreign phone numbers are helping some people get around those restrictions.
At the same time, the OpenAI models behind the ChatGPT program, which can write essays, recipes, and complex computer code, are relatively accessible in China and increasingly integrated into technology applications. Chinese consumption from social networking to online shopping.
The tool’s growing popularity is rapidly raising awareness in China of how advanced the US AI is and, according to analysts, tech companies in the world’s second-largest economy. how far the world has fallen as they try to catch up.
“There’s a lot of excitement around ChatGPT. Unlike the metaverse that has great difficulty finding a real-world application, ChatGPT has had great difficulty finding real-world applications,” said Ding Daoshi, director of Beijing-based internet consulting firm Sootoo. unexpectedly helps us achieve human-computer interaction.” “The changes it will bring about are more immediate, more direct and faster.”
OpenAI or ChatGPT itself is not blocked by the Chinese authorities, but OpenAI does not allow users in mainland China, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia and some parts of Africa to register.
OpenAI told Reuters it is working to make its service more widely available.
“While we want to make our technology available everywhere, conditions in some countries make it difficult or impossible for us to do so in a way that aligns with our mission,” the company said. based in San Francisco said in an emailed statement. “We’re currently working to increase the number of places where we can provide secure and beneficial access to our tools.”
In December, Tencent Corporation’ According to local media reports, WeChat, China’s largest messaging app, has closed a number of ChatGPT-related programs that have popped up online, but they continue to spring up.
Dozens of bots equipped with ChatGPT technology have popped up on WeChat, with hobbyists using it to create automated bots or accounts that can interact with users. At least one account charges users 9.99 yuan ($1.47) to ask 20 questions.
Tencent did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
ChatGPT supports interaction in Chinese and has a high ability to converse in Chinese, which has helped drive informal adoption in the country.
Chinese companies also use proxy tools or existing partnerships with Microsoft, which is investing billions of dollars in its OpenAI, to access tools that allow them to embed AI technology in my product.
Shenzhen-based Proximai in December introduced a virtual character into its 3D game-like social app, which uses ChatGPT’s underlying technology to chat.
Beijing-based entertainment software company Kunlun Tech plans to incorporate ChatGPT in its Opera web browser.
SleekFlow, a startup backed by Tiger Global in Hong Kong, says it is integrating AI into its customer relationship messaging tools.
“We have customers around the world,” says Henson Tsai, founder of SleekFlow. “Among other things, ChatGPT performs excellent translations, sometimes better than other solutions currently on the market.”
censorship
Reuters tests of ChatGPT indicate that chatbots are not averse to sensitive questions in mainland China. For example, when asked for their thoughts on Chinese President Xi Jinping, they replied that they had no personal opinion and offered a variety of views.
But some of its proxy bots on WeChat have blacklisted such terms that, according to other checks by Reuters, comply with China’s strict censorship of its cyberspace. When asked the same question about Xi on a ChatGPT proxy bot, it responded by saying that the chat violated the rules.
To comply with China’s rules, Proximai founder Will Duan said his platform filters information provided to users during their interactions with ChatGPT.
Chinese regulators, which last year introduced rules to strengthen the management of “deepfake” technology, did not comment on ChatGPT, however, state media this week warned of the risks. stock market risk amid the madness of domestic ChatGPT concept stocks.
China’s Cyberspace Administration, the internet regulator, did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
“With the regulations introduced last year, the Chinese government is saying: we have seen this technology develop and we want to stay ahead,” said Rogier Creemers, assistant professor at Leiden University. catch”. “I fully expect the majority of AI-generated content to be apolitical.”
Chinese opponent
Joining the buzz are some of the country’s biggest tech giants like Baidu And alibaba who released updates this week on the AI models they’re working on, driving their shares up.
Baidu said this week it will complete internal testing of “Ernie Bot” in March, a major AI model the search company has been working on since 2019.
On Wednesday, Alibaba said its research institute Damo Academy is also testing a ChatGPT-style tool.
Duan, whose company is using a Baidu AI chatbot called Plato for natural language processing, said ChatGPT is at least a generation more powerful than current Chinese NLP solutions, though it is weaker in some areas, such as understanding conversational context.
Baidu did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Access to OpenAI’s GPT-3, or Generative Pre-training Transformer, was first released in 2020, an update that is the backbone of ChatGPT.
Duan said the potential long-term compliance risks mean that Chinese companies will most likely replace ChatGPT with a local alternative, if they can match the product’s functionality due to United States developed.
“So we really hope that there may be alternatives in China that we can directly use… this solution can handle Chinese better and can also handle the Chinese language better. better regulatory compliance,” he said.
