Open AIbacked by Microsofthas maintained its application ChatGPT out of reach of users Chinabut its success is drawing enormous interest in the country, where companies are rushing to integrate the technology into their products and launch rival solutions.
Although residents of the country cannot create OpenAI accounts to access the artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot, virtual private networks (VPNs) and foreign phone numbers are helping some to circumvent those restrictions.
At the same time, the OpenAI models behind the ChatGPT program, capable of writing essays, recipes and complex computer code, are relatively accessible in China and are increasingly being incorporated into Chinese consumer technology applications, from social media to shopping. online.
The growing popularity of the tool is quickly making Chinese aware of how advanced American AI is and, according to analysts, how far behind tech companies in the world’s second-largest economy are in their fight to catch up.
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“There is great expectation around ChatGPT. Unlike the metaverse, which has enormous difficulties finding an application in real life, ChatGPT has suddenly helped us achieve human-computer interaction.”it states ding daoshidirector of the consultancy internet sootoobased in Beijing. “The changes it will bring about are more immediate, more direct, and much faster.”
OpenAI or ChatGPT itself is not blocked by Chinese authorities, but OpenAI does not allow users from mainland China to sign up, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia and parts of Africa.
OpenAI has never publicly explained those restrictions and did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
ChatGPT supports interaction in Chinese and is very capable of conversing in Chinese, which has helped fuel its unofficial 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 into their products.
next, based in Shenzhen, introduced a virtual character in its 3D game-like social app in December that used the underlying technology of ChatGPT to chat. entertainment software company Kunlun Techbased in Beijing, plans to incorporate ChatGPT into its Opera web browser.
SleekFlowa startup of Hong Kong backed by Tiger Globalsaid it was integrating AI into its customer relationship messaging tools.
“We have customers all over the world,” he declared. Tsai Henson, founder of SleekFlow. “Among other things, ChatGPT does excellent translations, sometimes better than other solutions available on the market.”
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Chinese rivals
Some of the biggest tech giants in the country, like Baidu and Alibabahave added to the expectation and have offered an update this week on the artificial intelligence models in which they have been working, which has triggered their shares.
Baidu said this week it would complete internal testing of its “Ernie Bot” in March, a large AI model the search firm has been working on since 2019.
On Wednesday, Alibaba said its research institute Damo Academy I was also testing a ChatGPT-like tool.
Will Duanthe founder of Proximai, which has been using Baidu’s Plato chatbot for natural language processing (NLP), said ChatGPT was at least a generation more powerful than China’s current PLN solutions, though weaker in some areas. such as understanding the context of the conversation.
Baidu did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
access to GPT-3 The OpenAI, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, was first released in 2020, an update that is the backbone of ChatGPT.
Duan said potential long-term compliance risks mean Chinese companies would likely replace ChatGPT with a local alternative, if they could match the functionality of the US-developed product.
“So we actually hope that there may be workarounds in China that we can use directly (…) it may handle Chinese better, and may also be more compliant“, he claimed.
Source: Reuters.
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Source: Gestion
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