Can AI give China the upper hand to surpass the US and become the world’s top economy after ChatGPT changed the game?
- China’s internet giants Baidu, Alibaba and Kunlun have been quick on the uptake after ChatGPT was unveiled last year, adding to the conflict in the US-China tech war
- It has long been suggested China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy, but its weak recovery from the impact of the coronavirus has raised doubts
When the San Francisco-based OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the market in November, hailed as the so-called iPhone moment for artificial intelligence (AI), it cast a shadow across the Pacific.
China’s internet giants, though, have been quick on the uptake. Baidu launched its Ernie bot in March followed by Alibaba Cloud and Kunlun’s Tiangong in April. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
Smaller firms are also jumping on the bandwagon every day, with AI and its application increasingly the new lane of competition between China and the United States.
[We] have to be quick, to catch up with the times
“[We] have to be quick, to catch up with the times,” Zhou Feng, CEO of NetEase’s translation software unit Youdao, said during an interview with domestic media DuoZhi earlier this month.
“What we are facing is a revolution at the technological level.”
The world’s two largest economies have already been fighting for economic supremacy with a tit-for-tat trade war, the US-led supply chain decoupling and tech containment in the past five years.
And while domestic academics largely estimate that China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy around 2030, the weak recovery from the impact of the coronavirus has raised speculation overseas that it may never happen, just like the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and Japan in the 1980s.
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Is China’s technology falling behind in the race for its own ChatGPT?