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Letters | ChatGPT’s rise highlights need for more support of open source community

  • Readers discuss developments since ChatGPT took the world by storm, and an inexpensive and easy way to boost young people’s physical and mental health

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An employee explains the AI-powered Microsoft Bing search engine and Edge browser during an event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on February 7. Photo: Bloomberg
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As university students pursuing a master’s degree in language studies, we are excited to learn that Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has decided to embrace ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art large language model, in the long term. We agree with your correspondents in “Why Hong Kong universities should let students learn with ChatGPT” (February 24) that students should be allowed to learn collaboratively with the chatbot.
Yet, it is regrettable that OpenAI, the developer of the technology, has not made ChatGPT available to users in China, including Hong Kong. Alternative services from providers such as Poe.com are not as powerful as the original ChatGPT.

As Elon Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI, pointed out, the company was originally founded as a non-profit organisation. Unfortunately, it abandoned the open source model and exclusively licensed GPT-3, the large language model behind ChatGPT, to Microsoft.

We hope the open source community can receive more support from governments and foundations around the world to develop a large language model with a completely open source code so third parties can customise the chatbot through further training. Since the machine learning of large language models involves billions of parameters consuming enormous computing resources, the open-source community could also take advantage of distributed computing approaches, such as the one adopted by the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, which engaged millions of computers from volunteers worldwide to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Liang Jiawen and Peng Rong, Kowloon Tong

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